The Bishop's Boys (53 page)

Wilbur for his part regarded Ferber with open contempt. He was “infected with ambition,” and, for all of his admiration of the Wrights, had apparently worked hard to scuttle the 1906 negotiations. “Since then,” Will commented, “he has done all he could to prevent us from doing business here.” In the privacy of his diary he noted that “Ferber evidently is double-faced, but at bottom bitterly hostile.”
²²

Most of the other experimenters whom he met—Tatin, Besançon, de la Vaulx, Esnault-Pelterie, Archdeacon, and Voisin—doubted his claims. Frank Lahm and his son, Frank Jr., a West Pointer (Class of ’01) and the winner of the first James Gordon Bennett balloon trophy in 1906, were his only close friends.

On July 3, Fordyce told Wilbur and Berg that he would soon introduce
them to a representative of the Ministry of War. Several days later, word came from the ministry that a one-year period of exclusivity would be required rather than the six months that had been offered. Wilbur would not give way. When they finally met with Major A. L. Targe of the ministry on July 9, however, he led them to believe that the original six-month period would be quite satisfactory.

Returning to the ministry for a second meeting on July 19, they met with a General Roques, who insisted on a
three-year
period of exclusivity for his government. The two Americans made it perfectly clear that their proposal was a take it or leave it one. The general then asked them to rewrite their proposal as a formal contract, complete with the six-month exclusivity clause.

Berg and Wilbur passed the document on to Fordyce, who offered to translate and forward it to the ministry. They assumed that the government would give a clearcut answer. Instead, when Berg called on Fordyce at the
Le Journal
offices on July 25, he discovered that substantial changes had been made to the text of the contract during translation. Wilbur spoke to Fordyce that afternoon, calling a halt to the entire process until his brother arrived in Paris.

As Wilbur feared, the long separation and the complexity of the negotiations placed an enormous strain on his relationship with Orville. He did his best to keep his brother informed through letters and frequent cables, but confusion was inevitable. Wilbur would cable a new bit of information and ask for comment. Orville would attempt to respond, his answer invariably arriving too late to have any impact. By the end of June the combination of slow mail and unavoidably cryptic cablegrams led to misunderstanding between them.

“I have had only one letter a week from you (these very short) in the last month or more,” Orv wrote on July 11. “I have practically no information of what is going on. When you cable, you never explain anything so that I can answer with any certainty that we are talking about the same thing.” Nor was he happy with Flint & Company. “They surely have had advices of what was going on,” he complained, “but they have not sent me one word.”
²³

Orville feared that his brother was discussing an exclusive sale of their invention to the French, something to which he was absolutely opposed. Moreover, he was concerned about a story in the
New York Times
suggesting that Wilbur had offered to sell flying machines to the French for only $500 apiece. By July 1, no longer able to stand the uncertainty, he cabled his brother:

Wilbur received a second letter from his father subtly echoing Orville’s concern. “The complaint that I have not written fully and promptly is incomprehensible to me,” he replied sharply, “as I have written every few days and kept back nothing, even when giving news in a half-finished state was dangerous and liable to lead to misconceptions.”
²⁵

Wilbur reminded them that he asked Orville to make the trip in the first place, adding: “I never for a minute was so foolish as to suppose that the final decision should be made by the man at home, who, from the nature of the case, would necessarily be less competent to form a sound judgment than the man at the seat of action.”
²⁶

Orville had promised to join his brother in France with a finished airplane as soon as possible—“So far as his letters indicate, he spent his time on things of no use in the present situation, and left the necessary things undone.” Wilbur assured his father that he had done his best. “If a serious mistake has been made it lies in the assumption that the machine would be available quicker than now seems possible. I am not to blame for this.”
²⁷

In fact, Orville had worked hard at completing the first of a series of five airplanes, the machines the Wrights would fly in Europe and America in 1908 and 1909. They were virtual replicas of the 1905 airplane except for the seating arrangement, the controls, and a more powerful engine. The first Flyer, intended for immediate shipment to France, had already been partially assembled in Dayton before crating.

The long flights of 1905 proved that there was a limit to the amount of time a man could spend extended on the lower wing with his head elevated. That, and the requirement to carry a passenger on the coming demonstration flights, convinced the Wrights to switch to upright seating and a new warping control to replace the old hip cradle. In addition, the new system must incorporate controls allowing the pilot to teach a passenger how to fly.

The 1907 aircraft featured three control sticks. One elevator control was placed at the left hand of the pilot and another at the right hand of the passenger, or student pilot. The wing-warping and rudder controls were mounted between the two seats, on the pilot’s right and the passenger’s left.

With one airplane packed and ready to ship, Orville left for New York and Paris on July 18. Charlie would follow in early August, in case they chose to assemble and fly the machine. Orville arrived ten days later and was immediately drawn into the negotiations. For the first time, he had some notion of what Will was up against. Targe was out of town, and there was little to do but wait. Will left for Berlin with Berg on August 4 to check out the situation in Germany; Orv and Frank Cordley remained in Paris to superintend the work while they were gone.

Targe returned on August 6. At a luncheon that day, Senator Humbert, the man who was supposed to be presenting the Wright case to the Ministry of War, told Fordyce and Targe he believed the brothers to be frauds. They in turn assured Orv and Cordley that they did not share his view, and would see that the matter received prompt attention at the highest levels of government—a story Wilbur and Berg had heard several times over the past nine weeks. Then a new obstacle was thrown up in their path: a technical commission established to study the details of the contract proposed by the Wrights.

Will and Berg faced a different set of problems in Berlin. The situation was straightforward but little more promising. Isidore Loewe explained that the Germans were still smarting at the “derogatory” references to Kaiser Wilhelm. Anti-Wright feeling was so strong that “the military department would not be disposed to do anything even if we should be able to do all we had claimed,” Wilbur noted.
²⁸

But Will and Berg discovered that they could cut through the initial antagonism with relative ease. Over the next several days, they met with the leaders of the new German aeronautical program, including Major Hans Gross, head of the German airship detachment; Captain Richard von Kehler, director of the Motor Airship Study Company, a society established under the personal patronage of the Kaiser in 1906; and General von Lyncker, of the German General Staff. They were also introduced to industrial leaders, including Walther Rathenau, head of the great combine controlling the German electrical industry. It was even rumored that Helmut von Moltke, legendary chief of the General Staff, was mildly interested in the Wright brothers.

Wilbur accepted General von Lyncker’s invitation to develop a proposal for presentation to the German government. They hammered out the basic elements in a meeting with Loewe on the afternoon of August 7. The Wrights offered a machine capable of flying fifty kilometers
with a single pilot, and of making shorter nights with a pilot and observer. The price would be 100,000 marks for the first machine, plus an additional 50,000 marks to train a pilot. Wilbur had learned one great lesson from the French negotiations—never again would he offer a potential buyer exclusive ownership of his technology for any length of time.

Before presenting the new proposal to Von Lyncker, Wilbur returned to France. Having offered an exclusive sale to the French, he could not in good conscience open talks with the Germans until the situation in Paris was fully resolved. He was almost pleased to find Orv caught up in the same web in which he had been ensnared for so many weeks. The old arguments over an appropriate translation of the proposal continued with Fordyce, and they seemed no closer to obtaining a firm answer.

Wilbur and Orville made one final attempt to crack the multiple levels of corrupt bureaucracy. They translated the new German proposal into French and asked Fordyce to present it directly to the Ministry of War. Wilbur recalled that Fordyce “made all sorts of ridiculous objections to the form of it, saying it was not good French, &c., &c.” So far as the Wrights were concerned, that was the end of it. On August 24, Wilbur informed the Minister of War, through Fordyce, that all offers were withdrawn.
²⁹

Wilbur wrote to Chanute on September 2, explaining the situation:

In mid-September Wilbur went back to Berlin while Orville stayed on in Paris to tie off loose ends. The Germans seemed to be the most reasonable of men. By the end of the month, however, it was apparent that they would not sign a contract until they had seen the Wright machine fly. Yet Wilbur continued to regard the Kaiser as a prime customer. “They are not engaged in experiments of their own along
that line,” he told Chanute, “and would be very glad if we could put a practical machine in their hands.”
³¹

Had it been earlier in the season, Wilbur might have violated his principles and provided a demonstration flight, free of charge. He felt that he could trust the Germans, and that such a flight might persuade them to purchase Wright aircraft one by one rather than buying the right to produce them. “We, however, thought it best to wait till the opening of a new season before entering upon such a plan of doing business,” he told Chanute. “We did not like to disclose our machine at the tail end of the year, giving our imitators all winter to manufacture copies of it. We do not wish to get into law suits before we get the business properly organized and started.”
³²

Back in Paris, Orville handled two additional requests. One, from a Mr. Stewart of the Barnum & Bailey shows, was not the sort of thing in which they wished to become involved. Nevertheless, he made a quick trip to London to discuss the matter.

The second item was much more interesting. Lieutenant Frank Lahm, the elder Frank Lahm’s son, had recently asked if there was not still a possibility of dealing with the U.S. government. While the Wrights were not yet aware of it, Lahm’s query had special significance. Lahm had been living with his father in Paris while attending the French cavalry school at Saumur and had now been ordered back to the United States to take command of a portion of the aeronautical section of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Before leaving, he prepared a letter to the Chief Signal Officer, Brigadier General James Allen, the highest member of the Army Board: “I have to inform you that I have just had an interview with Mr. Orville Wright of Dayton, Ohio, in regard to the purchase of the aeroplane invented and successfully operated by himself and his brother, Mr. Wilbur Wright. It seems unfortunate that this American invention, which unquestionably has considerable military value, should not be first acquired by the United States Army.”
³³

In October, Orville received one more letter from the Board of Ordnance and Fortification, requesting that they meet with officials of the U.S. Army. He assured the Board that he and his brother would welcome such a conference and that nothing would give them greater pleasure “than to furnish the
first
machine” to their own government.
³⁴

Wilbur and Charlie Taylor left Paris on November 11—Charlie for Le Havre to pick up two boxes of equipment that would be required
back in Dayton, Will directly for London, via Bologne and Folkestone. They met in London two days later and went up to Liverpool, where they sailed for New York aboard
R.M.S. Baltic
on November 16. Will would spend a day or two in the Flint offices in New York, then move on to Washington to try to arrange the meeting with officials of the Board.

Orv was still in Paris performing one final task. The brothers had every intention of flying in Europe in the spring. If they could not strike a deal with a national government, then they would make their demonstration flights and sell machines one at a time to anyone with cash in hand. For that, they would need a stock of aircraft. The parts of five airframes were awaiting completion back in Dayton. Orville, the engine expert, would explain their needs to a number of French companies interested in bidding on the construction of a series of Wright engines to be on hand by the spring.