Unlocking the Sky (22 page)

George Santayana, the Spanish-American philosopher (and contemporary of Glenn Curtiss’s), is famous for noting that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But Santayana also proposed that “history is always written wrong. So it always needs to be rewritten.” The sentiment propelled me through many partisan accounts of aviation’s early history and will, no doubt, encourage others to revise my interpretations and correct my mistakes.

Whenever possible, this work derives from primary sources, such as letters, cables, photographs, and journalistic accounts from the period. Many of these materials reside at two archives: the Glenn Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport, New York, and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Garber Facility in Suitland, Maryland. Of particular help at the Curtiss Museum were copies of the
Bulletin of the AEA,
transcriptions of private cables sent from Jim Smellie’s pharmacy, collected oral histories from some of Curtiss’s relatives and coworkers, as well as numerous collections of newspaper clippings about Curtiss and voluminous, uncataloged boxes of postcards, photographs, and memorablia related to his life and work. I also benefited from a rare copy of Curtiss’s 1912 autobiography,
The Glenn Curtiss Story,
especially its detailed, first-person account of the 1910 Hudson River flight. In addition, the cav
ernous museum houses a full-scale replica of the
June Bug
and many original Curtiss artifacts, including his early motorcycles and flying boats.

Particularly helpful primary sources in the Smithsonian’s collection include Charles Walcott’s personal photographic record of the aerodrome reconstruction, Alexander Graham Bell’s voluminous and wide-ranging aviation scrapbooks—technically labeled the “Early Aeronautical Newsclipping (Alexander Graham Bell) Collection—1906–1911”—and important selections from the correspondence of Octave Chanute. Also helpful were the Glenn H. Curtiss Collection, the Samuel P. Langley Collection, the Early Aeronautical Patent Collection, and the impressive William Hammer Collection, including many rare programs, schedules, pamphlets, and even menus from some of aviation’s most important meets and gatherings.

As useful as these resources were, my book also relies heavily on many excellent books and articles about Curtiss and early aviation. First among them is Cecil R. Roseberry’s meticulous biography,
Glenn Curtiss: Pioneer of Flight.
Interested readers are referred to Roseberry’s far more thorough treatment of Curtiss’s life. Roseberry is to be especially commended for interviewing many of the last remaining individuals with personal reminiscences about Curtiss, something that is now, alas, impossible to replicate. Other noteworthy volumes on Curtiss include Alden Hatch’s 1942 work,
Glenn Curtiss: Pioneer of Naval Aviation,
and Clara Studer’s 1937 book,
Sky Storming Yankee.

Published works of special note also include: Octave Chanute’s
Progress in Flying Machines
(1894), a book that more than any other conveys the ferment in aviation research around the turn of the century; the collected papers of Albert Zahm; Samuel Pierpont Langley’s posthumously published account of the aerodrome’s development; the Wright brothers’ collected papers; Charles Gibbs-Smith’s authoritative volumes on early aviation history—especially the primary source material
he collected about the 1909
Grande Semaine d’Aviation
in Rheims, France; Jack Carpenter’s quirky but useful volume
Pendulum,
a compendium of excerpted source material about Curtiss, the Wrights, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, and others of the period; David Baker’s encyclopedic
Flight and Flying: A Chronology,
offering dates and capsule descriptions of every important milestone in aviation from 850
B.C
. through 1991; and Phil Scott’s
The Pioneers of Flight: A Documentary History,
a readable and well-chosen selection of writings by many of the important early figures in aviation history including Cayley, Ader, Mouillard, Bleriot, and many others.

A complete bibliography follows:

Abbot, Charles G.
The 1914 Tests of the Langley “Aerodrome.”
Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections. Vol. 103, No. 8. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, October 1942.

———.
Samuel Pierpont Langley.
Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections. Vol. 92, No. 8. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, August 22, 1934.

———.
The Relations Between the Smithsonian Institution and the Wright Brothers.
Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1928.

Bell, Alexander Graham.
The Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers, 1862–1939.
Online collection of the U.S. Library of Congress. Available at: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/bellhtml/bellhome.html.

———. “Aerial Locomotion,” address before the Washington Academy of Sciences, December 13, 1906.
Proceedings of the Washington Academy of Sciences
VIII (March 1907): 407–48.

Brashear, John A.
The Autobiography of a Man Who Loved the Stars.
Ed.W. Lucien Scaife. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925.

Brewer, Griffith. “The Langley Machine and the Hammondsport Trials.”
Aeronautical Journal
25, no. 132 (December 1921): 620–44.

Brown, Carrie. “Man in Motion.”
Invention and Technology
(Spring 1991): 50–57.

Brown, R. J. “Alexander Graham Bell and the Garfield Assassination.”
The History Buff.
Online resource at www.discovery.com.

Bruce, Robert V. “Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude.” In
Technology in America: A History of Individuals and Ideas,
ed. Carroll W. Pursell Jr. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1981.

Callander, Bruce D. “Five Smart Men Who Didn’t Invent the Airplane.”
Air Force Magazine,
(January 1990): 88–94.

———. “The Critical Twist.”
Air Force Magazine
(September 1989): 150–56.

Casey, Louis.
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New York: Crown Publishers, 1981.

Cayley, George. “On Aerial Navigation.”
Nicholson’s Journal of Philosophy
XXIV (1809): 164–74. Reprinted in James Means, ed.
Aeronautical Annual,
1895.

Chaikin, Andrew.
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Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1997.

Chanute, Octave.
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New York: American Engineer and Railroad Journal, 1894. Reissued Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1997.

———. “Scientific Invention.” Address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, August 1886.
Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Vol. XXXV. Salem, Mass.: Salem Press, 1886.

Crouch, Tom D.
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New York: W. W. Norton, 1989.

———. “The Feud Between the Wright Brothers and the Smithsonian.”
Invention and Technology
(Spring 1987): 34–46.

———.
A Dream of Wings: Americans and the Airplane, 1875–1905.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1981.

Curtiss Aeroplane Company.
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Catalog booklet published by the firm c. 1912. Reprinted by the Glenn H. Curtiss Museum, Hammondsport, N.Y., 1986.

Curtiss, Glenn H. “The Commercial Side of Aviation: Business Possibilities of the Aeroplane.”
The Saturday Evening Post.
October 1, 1910.

———, and Augustus Post.
The Curtiss Aviation Book.
New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1912.

Dollfus, Charles, and Henri Bouche.
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Paris: Editions Saint-Georges, 1942.

Eklund, Don Dean.
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Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Colorado, 1970.

Flink, James J.
America Adopts the Automobile, 1895–1910.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970.

Gibbs-Smith, Charles H.
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London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1974.

———.
Aviation: An Historical Survey from Its Origins to the End of World War II.
London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1970.

———.
Sir George Cayley, 1773–1857.
London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1968.

———.
The Invention of the Aeroplane (1799–1909).
New York: Taplinger, 1965.

Goldstrom, John.
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New York: Macmillan Company, 1930.

Grahame-White, Claude.
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Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1911.

Grey, Charles G.
The Air Cadet’s Handbook on How an Aeroplane Flies.
London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1941.

Grosvenor, Edwin S., and Morgan Wesson.
Alexander Graham Bell: The Life and Times of the Man Who Invented the Telephone.
New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997.

Hammondsport Herald.
Selected editions, 1903–1915.

Hatch, Alden.
Glenn Curtiss: Pioneer of Naval Aviation.
New York: Julian Messner, Inc. 1942.

Hodgins, Eric. “Heavier Than Air (Profile of Orville Wright).”
New Yorker
(December 13, 1930): 29–32.

Hodgins, Eric, and F. Alexander Magoun.
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Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1929.

Howard, Fred.
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New York: Ballantine Books, 1987.

Hughes, Thomas P.
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New York: Viking, 1989.

Jakab, Peter L.
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Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.

Josephy, Alvin M. Jr., ed.
The American Heritage History of Flight.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962.

Kelly, Fred C.
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New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943.

Kelly, Fred C., ed.
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New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1951.

Kirk, Stephen.
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Winston-Salem, N.C.: John F. Blair Publisher, 1995.

Langley, Samuel Pierpont, and Charles M. Manly.
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Vols. 1 and 2. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1911.

Larson, George C. “Glenn Curtiss: The Innovator.”
Business and Commercial Aviation
(February 1982): 44–46.

Levinson, Nancy Smiler.
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New York: Dutton, 1994.

Loening, Grover.
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New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1935.

Marrero, Frank.
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San Francisco: Scottwall Associates, 1997.

McFarland, Marvin W., ed.
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Vol. 1,
1899–1905.
Vol. 2,
1906–1948
. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953.

Means, James, ed.
Epitome of the Aeronautical Annual.
Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1910.

Mouillard, L. F.
L’Empire de l’Air:
Paris: 1881. Extracted and translated version under title “The Empire of the Air” reprinted in
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(1892): 397–463.

Munson, Kenneth.
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1903–14. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

Newcomb, Simon.
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New York: Harper and Brothers, 1906.

Park, Edwards. “Langley’s Feat—and Folly.”
Smithsonian
(November 1997) 30–34.

Pisano, Dominick A., and Cathleen Lewis, eds.
Air and Space History: An Annotated Bibliography.
New York: Garland Publishing in association with National Air and Space Museum, 1988.

Post, Augustus. “The Evolution of a Flying Man: Incidents in the Experience of Glenn H. Curtiss with Motors and Aeroplanes.”
Century Magazine
(c. 1910).

Prendergast, Curtis.
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Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life, 1980.

Rendall, Ivan.
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London: BBC Books, 1988.

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Flying
(April 1958): 40–68.

Root, Amos. “What Hath God Wrought?”
Gleanings in Bee Culture
(January 1905). Reprinted in Phil Scott, ed.
Pioneers of Flight,
135–36.

Roseberry, Cecil R.
Glenn Curtiss: Pioneer of Flight.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. Reissued, Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991.

Rotch, A. Lawrence.
The Conquest of the Air.
New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1909.

Scharff, Robert, and Walter S. Taylor.
Over Land and Sea.
New York: David McKay, 1968.

Scott, Phil, ed.
The Pioneers of Flight: A Documentary History.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.

———.
The Shoulders of Giants: A History of Human Flight to 1919.
Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995.

———. “Wright v. Curtiss.”
Air and Space
(June/July 1997): 66–71.

Sears, Stephen W. “The Intrepid Mr. Curtiss.”
American Heritage
(April 1975): 60–65.

Seely, Lyman J.
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Hammondsport Finger Lakes Association and Better Hammondsport Club, 1929.

Smithsonian Institution.
An Account of the Exercises on the Occasion of the Presentation of the Langley Medal, May 6, 1913.
Publication 2233. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1913.