Chasing Icarus (28 page)

Then the spectral figure of Brookins crawled from the smash. He reached up to his helmet, said the
Times
correspondent, “and tore it from his head, and cast it from him. Then his hands pressed his temples and he reeled as he tried to stand and face the spectators. Again he clutched at his waist, while an expression of agony convulsed his face, and then he turned, staggered a step or two, and sank to the ground.”

The Wright brothers, and their sister, Katharine, reached Brookins as he was being eased onto a stretcher. He was slipping in and out of consciousness, but when he saw Katharine, his former schoolteacher, he took her hand and whispered, “I’m not hurt much but I want a long rest.”

An hour after Brookins’s spectacular fall from grace, Hubert Latham launched his bid for the cup. But the wind had steadily increased throughout the morning so that it “now came whooping in puffy gusts out of the northeast,” and at every pylon the Frenchman was blown off course, losing precious seconds as he righted his machine. After lap five he was one minute and eleven seconds down on Grahame-White, and by lap ten the deficit had increased to three minutes twelve seconds. As he started lap fifteen, Latham was more than four minutes behind the Englishman’s time, and second place was the best for which he could hope. Then, as he cornered dead man’s turn, a flurry of wind caught his left wing and pushed him “directly into a group of automobiles which were parked near the fence by the side of the old running track . . . He passed so closely above their occupants that his motors roared deafeningly in their ears. They dropped out of their cars in panic and chairs went over and men and women fell and ran and scrambled toward the club house for safety.” Latham regained control of the Antoinette, but he had had enough; why risk his life when the chance of victory had gone?

Luncheon came and went without any further challenges to Grahame-White’s time, though the fifty-thousand-strong crowd didn’t appear too perturbed. They were too busy reliving the intense excitement of the morning. What had been the most thrilling moment? they asked one another. The Le Blanc smash? The Brookins crash? The Latham near miss? For many, certainly the reporters, it had been the arrival of Le Blanc in the press stand less than an hour after he had discharged himself from Dr. Ross’s care. According to several eyewitnesses, the doctor had been only too pleased to wave good-bye to the Frenchman, after he had “in a passionate outburst of rage and vexation, denounced every one connected with the meeting.” Le Blanc had then marched in his blue flying overalls into the press stand with “his head rounded in white linen bandages, a complicated structure of plastering under his chin, plasters over and under his right eye, and the eye itself closed,” and continued his tirade against everything and everyone. With his translator clearly struggling to keep up, Le Blanc raved that he had run out of gasoline on his final lap, something that “was all the fault—the utter stupidity—of one of my mechanics,” who had failed to fill the second tank to the brim. Had the poor man been discharged of his responsibilities as a result? ventured a nervous correspondent. “My dear young man,” snarled Le Blanc, “that was a decision I reached the very instant I hit that pole.”

Le Blanc then added in a statement “that was nothing of insinuation but instead a direct accusation, that there had been something of intent in this failure to fill the petrol tank.” But the Frenchman, perhaps realizing he had gone too far in bandying about such allegations, refrained from elaborating and instead “walked the length of the grandstand to show he was not injured, and was cheered again and again.”

His reception on hangar row was less enthusiastic, particularly when it was learned he was blaming his mechanics for his demise. That was cheap, considered Grahame-White, as a “thoughtful aviator would always examine his craft and oil supply before ascending.” What he, and a lot of the other fliers, suspected was that Le Blanc had intentionally carried the bare minimum of gasoline so that his machine would be as light as possible. Then, when he had descended to take the pylon, what fuel he had left ran down into the front of his engine, leaving him, so to speak, high and dry.

But Le Blanc’s rash talk of chicanery brought an ironic smile to Grahame-White’s face. The same word had sprung to his mind a short while earlier as he sifted through the wreckage of Le Blanc’s machine looking for clues as to why the Frenchman’s Blériot had been so much quicker than his own when they were supposed to be identical. He was aware of the different propellers, but that shouldn’t have accounted for such a discrepancy in speed. Grahame-White had inspected the Gnome engine, but found it to be the same as his. Then he scrutinized the damaged chassis, and suddenly the penny dropped. “I found that the tube which carries the forward supports of the wings on his machine was placed underneath the top fuselage longitudinals,” he wrote a short time later, “whereas mine [the tube] was placed on top of the fuselage longitudinals, which made a difference of some four or five inches in the angle of incidence of the wings. And, although my wings were identical and quite as flat as his, his placing of them on the fuselage would naturally make his machine very much faster.”

Grahame-White realized that it was “only an accident that occurred to Le Blanc’s machine that caused me to learn of the deal he [Blériot] had tried to pull off on me—in other words to furnish me with a machine that was not equal in speed to Le Blanc’s.” The perfidious Blériot had sold Grahame-White an airplane he knew was inferior to the one he had delivered to his compatriot, and his patriotic deviousness would have succeeded had it not been for the rashness of Le Blanc.

The Belmont Park crowd was becoming fractious, noticed the correspondent from the
World
, because they “could not understand why the other Americans, Hamilton and Drexel, held back. It had passed 3 o’clock and neither of them had come forward to challenge the Britisher’s claim to the cup.” Worse, from the home fans’ point of view, was that Latham and Alec Ogilvie had both gone up again and finished the course, albeit in slow times. As it stood now, first and second place belonged to Britain, with France in third. The United States faced humiliation. Apart from Peter Prunty’s announcement an hour earlier that Walter Brookins would be back on his feet in a few days (“black-and-blue, as though he had been beaten with a club, but no bones broken,” as Dr. Moorehead told the
New York Times
) there had been scant else to cheer the whole day.

The crowd didn’t care that the wind had increased in the last hour and now teetered on the twenty-five-mile-per-hour mark; they had each paid $1 for a ticket—$2 for those in the grandstand—and they demanded action. Yet neither of the American fliers was keen to risk his neck after what he’d seen this morning. But then at three fifteen P.M.—seventeen minutes before the race’s cutoff time—Hamilton went up in his 110-horse power biplane. He was soon down, after one lap, with engine trouble. One of the French fliers rushed up to the American and, tugging at the sleeve of his leather coat, said, “Come, Monsieur Hamilton, I have a Blériot monoplane here for you . . . hurry! Grahame-White’s record will stand if you don’t.” Hamilton thanked the Frenchman but declined the offer, telling him that he had never before flown a monoplane, and in any case, the wind was just too nasty.

It seemed certain that the U.S. challenge for the International Aviation Cup had fizzled out in dispiriting circumstances, until one of the race organizers pointed out that when Brookins crashed, he hadn’t actually crossed the start line; in other words, the American team could call upon one of their three reserves. My God, he’s right! people shouted, and an official was dispatched to hangar row with instructions to get the first-named replacement, James Mars of the Curtiss team, up in the air at once.

The first of the Curtiss fliers that the official encountered was Eugene Ely, who explained casually that Mars was not there, he was on his way to a meet in Norfolk, Virginia. The official listened dumbstruck as Ely told him what he later repeated to the press, that the failure to select one of the Curtiss planes was “the smallest thing ever done . . . [and] at that late hour we refused to enter the race. Why should one of our machines go in the race as a substitute when it won the race last year?”

With only a few minutes remaining before the race closed, Grahame-White was looking more smug than ever. The Americans had to do something. Drexel had agreed to go up and was warming his engine, but so was James Radley, the third of the British fliers, who had been held in reserve by Grahame-White to counter just such a last-minute challenge.

“Moisant!” cried the officials. “Get Moisant.” The revolutionary was in his hangar finishing a meat pie when he was told to take off. “How long have I got?” he asked, already reaching for his aviation togs. Not long enough to stand around talking. The crowd was in pandemonium as they watched the three identical machines—all fifty-horse power Blériots—preparing to go aloft. Drexel was first to cross the start line at three twenty-five P.M., but by the time he completed his first leaden lap in 3 minutes 38 seconds, neither Moisant nor Radley was in the air. Now they were taxiing across the grass—but time was nearly up. Radley was next in line, but Moisant snuck ahead and took off at three thirty-one P.M. and thirty-five seconds. Radley waited for Moisant to rise to a safe height, then signaled to his mechanics he was ready. But before he could get airborne, Radley saw the timekeeper waving a red flag. He had been timed out—by twenty-five seconds.

Drexel lasted seven laps before he “narrowly missed a chimney top at the eastern end of the field and gave it up as a bad job,” and Moisant descended after lap six. He wasn’t finished, though, he told officials, he just needed to make an adjustment to his rudder. Forty-two minutes later Moisant was off again, eventually crossing the finish line in one hour fifty-seven minutes.
*
Allan Ryan was so tickled he forgot his position as general manager of the meet and came flying out of the judges’ box, shouting and waving and running toward Moisant. In a minute he had “fairly pulled him from the machine and dragged him protesting into the clubhouse.” Pushing Moisant before him, Ryan held up the aviator’s hand and hollered, “Here’s Moisant! He did it! He’s got second place for America! We may have lost the cup, but we showed them we could fly.” Then Ryan called for three cheers from everyone in the clubhouse, and the roar that followed, said the
New York Times
reporter, “must have been heard in the grandstand several hundred yards away,” even above the strains of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” from the band. The cheers were probably also heard over on hangar row, where Claude Grahame-White was wondering when he would receive the International Aviation Cup. Ever the gentleman, he had so far maintained a dignified silence on Blériot’s skulduggery, telling the reporter from the
World
that “the only manner in which I can account for Le Blanc being so far ahead of me . . . is that he was using a different kind of propeller.” He was also happy to concede that the Frenchman would have won, if not for his unfortunate mishap on his final lap.

In return, Grahame-White would have appreciated a little more respect for what he’d achieved, but the stench of churlishness drifted through the hangars as darkness fell on Belmont Park. Charles Hamilton let it be known that “Le Blanc is the best track driver in the world . . . Grahame-White would never have been in it except for Le Blanc’s accident.”

Armstrong Drexel even told the
New York Sun
that the committee should ask the Frenchman for his address “and telegraph the cup over.” As for Cortlandt Bishop, well, Grahame-White expected nothing less than a graceless barb, but was nonetheless taken aback by the Aero Club president’s curt assessment of the race: “It was a complete victory for the Gnome engine.” The Englishman didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

By the time the committee got round to the presentations, Grahame-White’s pique had turned to anger. Why should he be humble in the face of such ungraciousness? He approached the podium with “his debonair swagger,” said the
World
, “and with a cigarette hanging on his lips, smilingly received acknowledgements over his victory.” Grahame-White shook hands with Allan Ryan, J. C. McCoy, and Cortlandt Bishop, then the conquering hero turned his back on the vanquished and sauntered back to his hangar.

*
Wing warping was the key to the Wrights’ initial success as it gave the aviator roll control, in other words control of the airplane’s lateral movement. Wires connected from the control stick to the wingtips allowed the aviator to twist or “warp” the tips of the wings in flight.

*
His actual flying time was one hour and fifteen minutes, but his time spent on the ground was included in his final total.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It Isn’t True, It Can’t Be True!

Sunday, October 30, 1910

Unbelievable, utterly unbelievable. Claude Grahame-White threw the newspapers down in disgust as he took breakfast with Sydney McDonald in the Hotel Astor. Hardly a word of praise for his victory, just the hard-luck stories of Le Blanc and Brookins, and the plucky heroics of Moisant. And then there were the damned lies, such as the one in the
New York Globe
describing how Grahame-White had “continued to soar airily over the track . . . not worrying at all over the fall of his two rivals.” But he hadn’t even been in the air at the time! Still, he said, smiling at McDonald, at least among all the bumpkin reporting, there were one or two gems. Listen to this, in the
New York Sun.
Wilbur Wright, when asked to explain away the disastrous showing of his machine, replied, “We don’t believe in speed for its own sake, we don’t even think that it is the most important thing. They all go fast enough.” Ha! Thank heavens for the
New York Herald
, said the English aviator, admiring his photograph on the front page under the headline MR. GRAHAME-WHITE WINS INTERNATIONAL AVIATION CUP IN A MARVELOUS FLIGHT. He enjoyed the exuberance of the prose, too, particularly the sentence “It was a spectacle spectacularly modern, a spectacle as perfectly typical of the young century as ever was a chariot smashing, horse slaughtering dash around the Coliseum in the most splendid days of Rome.”

But what most caught Grahame-White’s eye on the
Herald
’s front page—aside from his own photograph, of course—was the small box in the right-hand corner that listed Sunday’s schedule. Along with the Hourly Distance and altitude contests (beginning at eleven A.M.), and the three P.M. cross-country flight, the small matter of the Statue of Liberty race was also still to be decided.

After the blazing row he’d had with the Belmont Park committee on Thursday, Grahame-White had pulled out of the race, even asking for the return of his entrance fee, but on Sunday morning an idea began to form in his mind. Le Blanc was in no fit state to fly, and Charles Hamilton’s 110-horse power machine was defective. The Curtiss boys were still sulking, and the Wright team was grounded on account of the Sabbath. He knew that neither Alex Ogilvie nor James Radley fancied the race, which left just a few Frenchmen, Armstrong Drexel, and John Moisant, none of whom had a machine as powerful as his own hundred-horsepower Blériot. It might well be the easiest $10,000 Grahame-White had ever made, and it would be a hoot to see the faces of the Belmont Park committee when he walked off with the spoils for a second time.

Unpopular as he was with the American aviation fraternity and certain sections of the nation’s press, Grahame-White remained a big hit with the fans, many of whom were “in a state of perpetual excitement” from the moment he strolled through the front gates of Belmont Park on Sunday morning. Among the dozens of men and women who stalked the Englishman’s every move “were some who begged continuously and imploringly to be taken aloft.” Young men wore their caps back to front in the Grahame-White style, and old men with fat wallets offered $500 for a five-minute flight. Meanwhile, the correspondent from the
New
York Tribune
reckoned that “most any girl would give a lock of her own real hair for a ride” with the handsome flier. But Grahame-White was deaf to all entreaties, and the only woman he seemed to have eyes for was Eleonora Sears, who accompanied him to the clubhouse—oblivious of “the envious green-eyed bunch that hung around the rail”—wearing an elegant brown suit and a large black velvet hat. It hadn’t gone unnoticed by the American press that since Miss Sears had met Grahame-White, she had dispensed with her “mannish style” of dress and replaced it with one more suited to a society woman.

Word soon spread along hangar row of Grahame-White’s change of heart toward the Statue of Liberty race. The
New York Herald
’s reporter telegraphed the news to his office in Herald Square, and they in turn alerted the
Owlet
, the
Herald
’s dispatch boat anchored in the waters off the Statue of Liberty, and also the wireless station in Fort Wood on Bed-loe’s Island, the operator of which was none other than Louis Ginsberg of the SS
Trent
, who had become something of a celebrity since his role in saving Wellman and the crew of the
America
.

By noon Belmont Park was bulging with humanity. Nearly seventy-five thousand were on the grounds or peeking through the gaps in the fence where some of the canvas sheets had been removed. The crowd “was not so fashionable” as on Saturday, but they were creating a livelier atmosphere; best of all, for the first time in eight days, the wind was under ten miles an hour. Typical, just typical, thought Arch Hoxsey and Ralph John-stone, who prowled the length of hangar row like two caged tigers. How they would have loved to be up in the air on such a benign day, challenging for the morning altitude contest, won by René Simon, with a feeble height of 959 feet.

Shortly before one o’clock Clifford Harmon escorted Augustus Post and Alan Hawley along hangar row and introduced the pair to Grahame-White. The three of them watched Harmon fly a couple of laps in his Farman biplane, then Grahame-White put on a show for the balloonists by taking up Sydney McDonald and one of his mechanics. This time the machine made it into the air despite the load, and after a brief spin, Grahame-White landed on the grass outside Harmon’s hangar, No. 16. He thanked his friend for the loan of his machine and went off to lunch. Not long after, Harmon followed, telling his mechanics not to bother to return his biplane to its hangar as he would soon be back for another flight.

John Moisant was finishing his own lunch in hangar No. 18 when Harmon disappeared in the direction of the clubhouse. With him were his brother, Alfred, and two of his sisters, Louise and Mathilde, who had recently arrived in New York. The women were still getting used to their brother’s being one of the most famous men in America, but they were warming to the idea. They had already watched him finish second to Hubert Latham in the morning’s Hourly Distance contest, and now they were helping him prepare for the Statue of Liberty race. “You’re going to win,” Mathilde told her brother, “I can feel it in my bones.”

Moisant was relying, however, on more than female intuition to win the race. In a fifty-horsepower Blériot, his only hope of beating Grahame-White would be to fly the direct route, straight over the city. But Moisant had never before flown over a metropolis and had no idea how it would affect the air currents. Would the currents eddy up, he wondered, “just as spray flies when it hits the wall?” To find out, Moisant called on the two people in the world who knew best: Ralph Johnstone and Arch Hoxsey. Get up high, they told him, out of the reach of the currents that hang over cities and that give the air more holes than a lump of Swiss cheese. On the return leg—and Moisant would have the wind at his back in the afternoon—they advised him to gradually descend and make use of the extra ground speed. They wished him good luck and made to leave, but Johnstone lingered for a moment at the hangar door. He imagined that Moisant’s stomach had started to tighten the way his always did. “Just be careful, John,” he said, “there’s no point in getting yourself killed. No amount of publicity’s worth that.”

The bomb exploded bang on one thirty P.M. to signal the start of the afternoon’s program, and Moisant decided to take his machine round the course for a few gentle laps before he embarked on the Statue of Liberty race at two forty-five P.M. He strode out of his hangar, acknowledging the good wishes of several dozen spectators who had talked their way onto hangar row and stood behind a line of small red flags planted in the grass, beyond which no one but the aviator and his mechanics were allowed. Among the crowd was a correspondent from the
Boston Daily
Globe
who had never been as close to an airplane as he now was. He watched in reverential silence as Moisant climbed into his machine and the propeller was engaged. The motor sparked and then . . . was this normal? the reporter wondered. The monoplane began “running over the ground on its chassis, like a great winged bicycle [it] took an involuntary turn to the left and instead of rising crashed head-on into the left wing of Mr. Harmon’s biplane.” There was a smash, a tearing sound, a splintering, followed by a torrent of profanities. When the
Globe
reporter reached the accident site, he found Moisant “looking like a man who wanted to fight somebody.”

The aviator clambered out and inspected his machine. The left wing was smashed, there were two cracks in the tail, and as much was left of the propeller as there had been of Le Blanc’s after his meeting with the telegraph pole. The mechanics quickly identified the cause of the collision as a rudder malfunction, but Moisant blamed his misfortune on Harmon for having left his machine unattended on the grass. What are you going to do? asked the
Globe
correspondent. Moisant shrugged dejectedly. “It will cost me about two thousand dollars to fix that machine,” he replied, adding that it would be impossible to repair it in time for the afternoon’s race.

People had been gathering at various points along the Statue of Liberty route since noon, and by two forty-five P.M. “fully one million persons in all the neighborhoods of the city” were waiting in hope of seeing an airplane. By three o’clock hardly a space was to be had in Brooklyn; there were crowds on the elevated railroad station at Thirty-sixth Street; huge numbers of people were picnicking in Prospect Park, field glasses close at hand among the sandwiches and cakes. Younger, more athletic aviation enthusiasts had secured vantage points atop the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument at Park Plaza, and chaos reigned in Highland Park, where police were trying to control the excited masses.

Similar scenes occurred in Queens, Jamaica, and Manhattan as the temperature hovered around 45 degrees Fahrenheit. Families were grouped on the walkways of bridges, on the tops of buildings, on the decks of boats. A reporter from the
World
joined the throng at the Battery. How many were there? He wasn’t sure, but he guessed around fifteen thousand, though they continued to arrive throughout the afternoon. They came, he wrote, “in automobiles and crested carriages as well as afoot and on street cars . . . from the Aquarium to the Barge Office, high-hatted men and women in rich furs mingled with the habitués of the park in a crowd that extended from the chains along the water’s edge to the beaches along the grass.” Five thousand people had made the journey from the Battery to the statue on Bedloe’s Island, according to the
New York Herald
, and “it was a restless crowd, filled with pleasurable anticipation.” A great many had squeezed onto the topmost level of the statue’s base, while the more energetic had climbed the spiral staircase inside the statue up to her head. Some carried field glasses, one or two telescopes, a young boy clutched a “bit of a windowpane he had smoked himself,” and a group of young women were equipped with opera glasses.

By three P.M. everyone on Bedloe’s Island was “turned constantly to the east, from which direction all knew the men of the air must come. The air was clear, the skies bright, the sun gleaming and wind so gentle that the flags of the craft that studded the bay, many of them at anchor, rose and fell listlessly.”

Count Jacques de Lesseps and Claude Grahame-White shook hands and returned to their hangars to make their final preparations for their flights to the Statue of Liberty. The Frenchman embraced his sister, then his brother, and at five minutes past three he set off. He circled the ground once, and a second time, then began to climb higher. The spectators in Belmont Park watched him fly west and pondered his route. In the opinion of the
Boston Daily Globe
reporter, he appeared to be “headed straight for the tower of the Singer Building on the lower end of Manhattan Island . . . in a general direction along the Long Island railroad.”

Three minutes later Grahame-White was in the air and “was seen to head fully four points of the compass more to the south.” Those spectators high up at the back of the grandstand watched him through their field glasses and told each other confidently he was going away from Brooklyn toward Coney Island. For several minutes seventy-five thousand people stood with their hands over their eyes watching as “the broad wings dwindled into mere patches, then grew smaller and smaller until only the keenest eye could follow and hold them in sight, and then they disappeared.” Now all the crowd could do was wait, and hope, like members of an arctic party left behind at base as their colleagues struck out for the pole.

De Lesseps was flying toward the yellow captive balloon that he could clearly see silhouetted against a golden sky just near the Statue. He was at two thousand feet and already feeling the cold through his blue jean overalls. Down below on the streets of Brooklyn people gazed up through their field glasses and read the number on the underside of the monoplane’s left wing. “Number Six,” they cried, and began flicking through their newspapers to the list, which identified it as “Count de Lesseps.” They resumed their stare, then suddenly they saw the machine fall.

At the controls of his Blériot the Frenchman was unsure what had happened. Everything had been fine, then all at once his world went black. He felt something running down his face—for an awful moment he thought it was blood, until he tasted the oil in his mouth. Wiping his goggles with his gloves, de Lesseps saw that a joint of his oil-feed pipe had ruptured, and oil was spurting over him like blood from a severed artery. He pulled out of the dive at fifteen hundred feet and maintained a steady altitude. For a few minutes he flew with one hand on the wheel and the other clamped over the broken pipe, but as he neared the Statue, he knew he would need both hands on the controls. He released his grip on the pipe and hoped for the best.

A reporter from the
New York Sun
was in Chinatown when de Lesseps appeared overhead a little before three thirty P.M., and he described the bedlam that ensued as the Chinese poured into the streets in bewilderment. “Some of the men waved their arms in the air and threw back their heads so far that they retained their balance with difficulty. Others rushed to their houses and up the stairs, chattering in what appeared to be terror. Still others raced from one side of a street to the other, gesticulating and trying to tell all within hearing of the great wonder.”