Chasing Icarus (21 page)

Just before noon a mechanic pulled back the two large flaps of the Wrights’ canvas hangar, and a few moments later the Baby Grand racer was wheeled out to cries of delight from the crowd.

Reporters lounging in the press stand jumped to their feet when they saw the Wrights’ great secret out in the open. When they picked up their field glasses and recognized Orville as the man in the flying clothes, they could barely contain their exhilaration. The younger of the two brothers had never before flown in the East—discounting the brief exhibition he had performed for the military at Fort Myer, Virginia, in 1908
*
—but here he was about to take the controls of what, in the eyes of the
New York Sun
’s reporter, resembled a “boy’s sized edition of the Wright biplane of familiar model.” He noticed that as the Baby Grand was shouldered onto the infield, “the foreign birds and their mechanics dropped everything else to see what the new type of racer would do.”

Wearing a leather coat, Orville Wright climbed up into the seat, “placed to the left of the center of the lower plane so that the driver’s weight will help in the stabilization of the airplane by making up for increased weight of heavier engine at his right.” Wilbur exchanged a few words with his brother, then, with a confident smile, he retreated to the grass in front of the hangar, where he squatted, the position he always adopted when watching his machines at work.

The propeller was engaged, the engine started, and off went Orville Wright, bouncing across the grass and rising into the air. He circled the course, then, after he cornered dead man’s turn with ease, he let out the engine and shot past the grandstand at a speed that left the reporters flabbergasted. Sixty miles an hour? No, sixty-five. More like seventy-five, said the man from the
New York Sun
. The correspondent from the
New York Herald
had a stopwatch on the Baby Grand as it streaked around the two-and-a-half-kilometer course. Wright turned into the home straight as all around the grounds “men, women and children jumped up on camp chairs, on seats and on railings, and yelled themselves hoarse.”

The
Herald
’s man stopped the timer as the Baby Grand crossed the strip of white canvas running across the sandy track. He puffed out his cheeks in astonishment: one minute and twenty-six seconds—more than half a minute faster than John McCurdy’s best lap in Monday’s speed race. Watching from his rickety steamer chair outside his hangar, Charles Hamilton was equally impressed. The Baby Grand was half the size of his monstrous 110-horsepower Hamilton, but its agility was awesome. The most worrying thing, however, he told the
Sun
’s correspondent, was that “you can’t tell whether Orville is letting her out or not. The chain gear makes so much noise that down here I can’t tell exactly how hard and fast the engines are going.”

When the demonstration had finished, several reporters hurried over to hangar row to discover if the Wrights were happy with how the machine had performed. On his way past some of the other hangars the
New York Herald
correspondent couldn’t help but notice the “intense discouragement in the camps of the foreign competitors” in the light of the Baby Grand’s display. The normally taciturn Orville Wright was “communicative to a slight extent,” and for several minutes he talked about his latest invention, explaining first that he and his brother had had no time to make anything especially for the machine because they wanted to have it ready for the Belmont Park Meet. For example, the gearing, the sprocket wheels, and the propellers came from existing stock in their Dayton factory. “When I have time, I will turn out propellers especially for these machines,” he continued, “and these will give a much higher rate of speed than we will get from these stock parts.” The
Herald
’s correspondent noted how Orville was like a man on his honeymoon, “gazing lovingly” at the airplane as he spoke, oblivious of the presence of others. The
Herald
asked why it was that while other inventors, particularly the French, were increasingly putting their faith in the monoplane, he and Wilbur believed in the superiority of the biplane. Wright admitted that the monoplane was a thing of beauty but, he added, “The innate fault of the single-plane machine is its weakness. It can never be made as strong as the biplane. The single plane always will be a weakness that will make advances beyond a certain point impossible.”

Then the
New York Sun
correspondent asked Orville what were the chances of England or France lifting the International Cup now that everyone had seen the power of the Baby Grand? “Well,” Wright answered with a wry smile, “I don’t know. I can’t tell yet whether Hamilton will keep the cup here or not!”

Tuesday at Belmont Park turned out to be what the
New York Herald
called “Wright Day.”
*
Orville had opened proceedings with his startling flight in the Baby Grand, and Ralph Johnstone wrapped up events by climbing to 7,303 feet, two hundred feet higher than Armstrong Drexel’s mark of the previous day. Earlier in the afternoon Johnstone and another of the Wright fliers, Arch Hoxsey—the “Stardust Twins”—had set off together in the altitude contest. Hoxsey had returned first, with his barograph indicating a height of 5,791 feet. Johnstone came down a while later and was met by Wilbur Wright, who was sure his boy had gone higher than Drexel. He looked for the barograph on his machine. Where was it? Wright asked. Johnstone blanched. He’d forgotten to attach it. The reporter from the
New York Sun
couldn’t see through his field glasses exactly what was being said in the center of the infield, but Wilbur Wright “conversed gently but earnestly with his pupil for a few minutes and as a punishment Mr. Johnstone was told that just for that he must go right out and break the American record before dinner.”

First Johnstone returned to the hangar to unknot his nerves before his second flight. He spent an hour or so making fun of his absentmindedness with his mechanics and Arch Hoxsey. He watched as de Lesseps and Hubert Latham tried unsuccessfully for the altitude record, then, a little after three o’clock, Johnstone quit his bantering and fell into a silent fidget; his mechanics knew it was time to prepare his plane. Johnstone buttoned up his leather coat over his thick sweater and pulled on his woolen cap, then he checked that he had his barograph, and at three thirty P.M. he and Hoxsey took off together.

Some greasy-looking clouds had started to roll in from the Jersey factories as the pair headed southeast, and by the time they were ascending in long spirals, a light drizzle was falling on Belmont Park. The crowd watched as “round and round they circled like hawks looking for prey.” One of the hawks was seen to descend, but the other grew smaller and smaller, then disappeared into a dark cloud. Johnstone’s leather gloves and boots were inadequate against the cold as he climbed higher, and he felt a chilling numbness. The rain had turned to a sleet that lashed and cut his face, and now the cloud brought with it a white, feathery snow. In a moment Johnstone was through the snowstorm and he glanced down at the barograph on his wrist. He could see nothing. He whipped off his goggles and banged them against his thigh, trying to break off the thin sheen of opaque ice that had formed. He thought he saw that the barograph read over seven thousand feet, but he couldn’t be sure. He felt desperately tired as he fumbled his goggles back over his weeping eyes.

Down on the ground the drizzle had stopped, and “anticipating accidents the crowd deserted the grandstand seats and crowded along the rail.” They watched as the speck flitted in and out of clouds, descending in great swoops, and then at a “height of about 4,000 feet and to the east of the aviation field, Johnstone dived out of a mist bank with his engine throttled down, and he finished his flight with a long volplane.” He landed his airplane on the far side of the aviation field and was collected by one of the tournament’s green automobiles, in which sat a race official and Wilbur Wright. Wright “delightedly held up the barograph,” and it was confirmed a little later that Ralph Johnstone had set a new American altitude record of 7,303 feet. When he arrived back at hangar row, John-stone’s clothes were dripping wet and his “knees shook and his face was swollen and red.” “Wow, that was cold,” he told a reporter from the
New
York American
. “It was snowing furiously and sleeting up there . . . If I’d been able to see, I would have gone on and smashed the world’s record. That was my purpose. I’ll do it yet before I leave this place.”

The other achievements at Belmont Park on Tuesday were prosaic in comparison to Johnstone’s towering feat. The British flier James Radley won the twenty-mile cross-country event, beating John Moisant, John McCurdy, and Armstrong Drexel, and in the gathering gloom Charles Hamilton and the Curtiss fliers took their machines for a short spin ahead of Wednesday’s qualification race to decide which three American fliers would represent their country in Saturday’s International Cup race. Moisant’s repaired Blériot had stood up well to the rigors of the cross-country flight, and he was his normal confident self, and Hamilton had no complaints either about his machine. But as if to reassert the Wrights’ preeminence, Orville Wright reappeared at the end of the day in the Baby Grand and knocked three seconds off his morning lap time by sailing round in one minute and twenty-three seconds.

It had been an unforgettable day, and an illuminating one, too, for the representatives of the American military on official assignment at Belmont Park. General James Bell, chief of staff under President Theodore Roosevelt, walked over to the Wrights’ hangar to offer his congratulations, accompanied by Commander John Barry Ryan of the U.S. Aeronautic Reserve, General James Allen, chief officer of the Signal Corps, and Lieutenant Benjamin Fulois, whose task it was to write the official report about the tournament for the War Department. While Bell chatted with the Wrights—they had first met during the brothers’ military trials at Fort Myer two years earlier—General Allen answered a couple of questions from the
New York Herald.
He had been mightily impressed by what he had seen, he said, stressing that “with a fleet of biplanes and monoplanes as large as that which flew here today, an army could do immeasurable damage in time of war.” Would he thus be advising President Taft to increase spending on aviation? “I am encouraging the War Department to take a deeper interest in aviation all the time,” he replied, adding, “We have good aviators in this country, and they prove this themselves when compared to the foreigners who are here now.”

In the press stand the correspondent of the
New York Evening Sun
had also been seduced by what he had seen throughout the day, and as he watched a long line of automobiles queuing to leave Belmont Park, he wrote, “The sight of the auto chugging over the hillocks brought up a sense of ancient days and one, to be up to the minute, had only to glance to the heavens and see the graceful flights, the swift swoops, the searing aloft to dizzy altitudes, and then put off that resolution to buy an auto and determine to wait for an airplane.”

The only unsavory incident of the stupendous day was the contretemps between Count de Lesseps and Cortlandt Field Bishop, president of the Aero Club of America. Admittedly discontent had been growing in the French camp for many days, said the
Evening Sun
, with “the rivalry between the English-speaking and French aviators intense and bitter in some respects,” but that was no excuse for the “ugly moment” that occurred shortly before the close of the day’s program. The trouble arose when Bishop told a group of reporters that de Lesseps had charged Mrs. Eustis—a friend of his sister’s, the Countess de la Bergassiere—$2,000 for a brief flight. When the reporters relayed the story to de Lesseps, his face darkened, and with a Gallic roar he went “running out of hangar in his grotesque air-riding costume and dashed around until he found Bishop.” With the grinning reporters ringing the two protagonists like spectators at a cockfight, de Lesseps began “shaking his fists up and down nervously” as he asked Bishop if what he had been told was true. The
New York Sun
described what followed:

“I did not,” stammered Bishop. “That is, I merely—”

“You did. You told me, Mr. Bishop,” said a young man hotly, who had edged through the crowd.

Mr. Bishop whirled around. “Can’t you take a joke?” Mr. Bishop demanded of the indignant one. “I was only joking when I told you that.”

The young man—unidentified by the newspapers—turned on his heel, but not before he had jabbed a finger at the president of the Aero Club, warning him that he was “through with you, Bishop, for good.”

Bishop held out a hand to de Lesseps and swore blind that it had been a joke, albeit an ill-judged one. “I have never accepted money for taking passengers up and I never will,” said the Frenchman, his gun-barrel eyes trained on Bishop. “I am a gentleman sportsman, not an aerial chauffeur.” The count stepped back and allowed the American safe passage from the ring. Then he turned to the reporters and told them if any more calumnies came from Bishop, he “would smash his face.”

Later that evening de Lesseps had forgotten all about the distasteful incident when his engagement to Grace McKenzie was officially announced at a discreet party at the Knickerbocker Hotel. With Bishop’s apology common knowledge among the guests, de Lesseps was satisfied that his fiancée’s wealthy family knew him to be a man of impeccable conduct.

*
The
New York American
reported on October 29, 1910, that according to Edward Stratton of the Aero Club of America, “not less than 50,000 men were engaged in the search for Hawley and Post.”

*
In the accounts given by Hawley and Post to newspapers in the immediate aftermath of their rescue, they confused their time line, presumably because of their exhausted mental state, telling reporters that they had come across the tent on Sunday morning. However, in an extensive article written by Augustus Post, published in the December 1910 edition of
Century Magazine
, he states that it was Monday morning. This is corroborated in written statements provided by Pedneaud and Simard.