6
THE FLIGHT FACTORY
The two modest brick buildings that face Abbey Avenue between West Third Street and U.S. 35 in West Dayton are easy to miss; they’re almost indistinguishable in a long row of attached buildings that includes three similar structures. For decades, massive manufacturing buildings surrounded them, hiding the smaller buildings from public view. These buildings were the Wright Company’s airplane factory, later to become the birthplace of General Motors’ Inland Division. Inland’s epic success as a global auto parts supplier overshadowed the buildings’ history as the birthplace of America’s aviation industry. But just inside the entrance to Building 1, an intriguing mural covers the wall. Now faded, it shows Wilbur circling the Statue of Liberty in his canoe-laden flyer. The existence of these buildings owes much to Wilbur’s exhibition flights at the Hudson Fulton celebration.
Wilbur was still in New York when a young man named Clinton R. Peterkin approached him. Peterkin was just twenty-four, but he had some powerful connections. He had worked as an office boy at J.P. Morgan & Company in New York, but health problems had forced him to go west. Now he was back, and he was looking for opportunities to broker business deals. He tracked down Wilbur at the Park Avenue Hotel and offered to use his connections to help the Wright brothers find investors to form a company. Wilbur told him the brothers wanted to talk only to “men of consequence,” Kelly wrote in The Wright Brothers.
Peterkin met with Morgan, the legendary Wall Street banker, who agreed to buy stock on behalf of himself and his friend, Judge Elbert H. Gary, head of U.S. Steel. Other top moneymen quickly joined in, including DeLancey Nicoll (a prominent financial lawyer), Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, Andrew Freedman and others. The Wright brothers also invited Robert J. Collier, publisher of Collier’s Weekly, and the Alger brothers of Detroit. Despite their great wealth and power, the other investors feared Morgan and Gary would dominate the board of directors. They asked them to bow out, and the two men complied. The remaining group incorporated the Wright Company in New York on November 22, 1909. The stock issue raised $1 million. In exchange for the rights to their U.S. patent, Wilbur and Orville received $100,000 in cash, 40 percent of the stock and a 10 percent royalty on every airplane sold. The company also agreed to bear the expense of patent enforcement. It opened a corporate office at 527 Fifth Avenue. Wilbur became president, and Orville and Freedman became vice-presidents.
The original two Wright Company factory buildings (left foreground) and adjoining later buildings as they looked in early 2014. Courtesy of the National Aviation Heritage Area.
The Wright brothers never aspired to join the ranks of New York business tycoons. Writing to Chanute on December 6, Wilbur said, “The general supervision of the business will be in our hands though a general manager will be secured to directly have charge. We will devote most of our time to experimental work.”
But their formation of a million-dollar company with some of the most powerful businessmen in America sent a shudder through the Dayton press. Where would these East Coast capitalists locate the manufacturing plant? Would the Wright brothers, now rich and famous industrialists, abandon their hometown for big-city life? “Practically every city in the country will be after the airship factory,” the Dayton Herald fretted in a page one story on November 23, 1909. “Dayton must act promptly to get it,” it warned. “The location of their plant in Dayton would be the crowning feature of the Gem City.”
It was a legitimate concern, but the editors needn’t have worried. The Wright family was rooted in Dayton, and Wilbur and Orville wouldn’t have dreamed of abandoning their father, Katharine and Lorin. “We propose to have the first and largest airship factory in the country—to have it here at home,” Orville said in the New York Times on November 25 after signing the incorporation documents.
The Wright brothers began the hunt for a factory site, but they didn’t want to wait to start production. They converted their bicycle shop into the Wright Company’s engine plant and put it under Taylor’s direction. They rented space for building airplanes from the Speedwell Motor Car Company. Speedwell had a big new factory less than two miles south, at 1420 Wisconsin Boulevard in the Edgemont District. The six-acre complex had space the automaker didn’t immediately need, so Speedwell leased it to the Wright Company from January through September.1
A Wright Flyer on a cart outside Speedwell Motor Car Company factory. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.
In these facilities, America’s first aerospace workforce began to take shape. Building an airplane requires an array of skills and a desire for precision workmanship. And no doubt the tireless Wright brothers expected their employees to harbor a strong work ethic. “‘The great difficulty at present,’” an April 1910 New York Times story quoted Wilbur as saying, “‘is to get the right kind of hands in our factory. We have got to teach each man his particular duty, and that takes a whole lot of time.’”2
The rented space at Speedwell gave the Wright Company the capacity to produce two airplanes a month. Its first product was the Model B. Wilbur and Orville gave its rollout the kind of fanfare you would expect from them: none. They loaded it onto a horse-drawn hay wagon, its front and rear sections stuffed between the wings, and hauled it out to Huffman Prairie. Transporting flyers out to Simms Station on wagons was a ponderous business, so workers typically moved them at night to avoid daytime traffic.
EVOLUTION OF THE B
Oddly, the Wright Company never produced a Model A. Historians presume that’s how the Wright brothers thought of their 1907 flyer, the model they flew through 1909 and sold to the army. The company’s first product was the Model B, introduced at the beginning of the 1910 flying season. The B was the first U.S. airplane manufactured in substantial numbers, and it became the company’s workhorse.
Model Bs were used to train Wright Company pilots and many of America’s pioneer aviators. Wright exhibition pilots mainly flew Model B planes. When the Wright Company transferred operations from Speedwell to its own plant, the Model B became the first airplane produced in a factory built for aircraft production. A Model B piloted by Phil O. Parmelee made the first commercial cargo flight on November 7, 1910, carrying two bolts of silk from Huffman Prairie to Columbus for the Morehouse-Martens Company. The first Wright floatplanes were Model Bs. Massachusetts yacht designer W. Starling Burgess also produced Model Bs in Marblehead under license as the Burgess Model F, also known as the Burgess-Wright.
An original, modified Wright B Flyer in the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. Note the ailerons visible on the bottom wing. Author’s photo.
The first Wright Model B didn’t exactly roll out of the factory—it still sat on runners. The model evolved gradually from the 1907 design with a front-mounted elevator. The Wright brothers lengthened the tail and added a fixed horizontal stabilizer, then made it moveable in coordination with the front elevator. Next, they removed the front rudder. The Wright brothers “made some experiments with wheels” at Simms Station on July 21, according to Milton Wright’s diary. A Model B with wheels under its runners first appeared in public on August 10 at an air meet in Asbury Park, New Jersey. The Wrights continued to make other small changes. Even in 1911, Wilbur added dihedral to the wings, and Orville added small, square vanes under the top wing in separate efforts to improve stability.
A century after Parmelee’s cargo flight, the nonprofit heritage organization Wright “B” Flyer, Inc. reenacted the flight with a modern lookalike of a Model B. Instead of silk, the airplane carried samples of advanced materials and a micro air vehicle from the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
The only authentic Model B from the Wright Company factory that still exists is on display in the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. A highly modified Model B with ailerons is on display in the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.3
The Wright Company factory in 1911. Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Despite their stated desire to remain in Dayton, the Wright brothers’ use of a rented factory must have made some wonder about their true intentions. Their decision to buy a big lot for a new home at Salem and Harvard, north of downtown, made front-page news. “When the Wright brothers became the heroes of the aviation world, Dayton’s ability to hold them was at once questioned,” the Dayton Daily News noted on January 10, 1910. It said their purchase of a residential lot “clearly indicates that they have no thought of making any other city their permanent home. It is also accepted as a strong indication that the factory will be permanently located in this city.” As it happened, the Wright family gave up the lot for a site in suburban Oakwood. But the initial purchase made it clear they weren’t leaving the area.
Civic leaders faced the happy prospect of a whole new industry for Dayton. The chamber of commerce made plans to include a special “Aviation Day” in a six-day fall festival and industry expo planned for September. The event would take over the central business district and involve the erection of a massive expo hall, longer than a football field, on public land between Second and Third Streets. “Aviation Day” was to include, of course, flying exhibitions. The “City of a Thousand Factories” would welcome its 1,001st in grand style.4
Wilbur and Orville had no desire to run a factory. For that job Russell Alger suggested his cousin, Frank Russell. “He has had a great deal of factory experience under very adverse conditions, and he is fully qualified in that direction. He has had also a good deal of business experience. He is a natural mechanic,” Alger wrote on November 29. Wilbur met with Frank Russell in December and agreed to hire him. He moved his family to Dayton in January 1910 and reported to the Wrights in their office over the old bicycle shop. With no more space available there, the Wright brothers found him a room in the rear of a plumbing shop down the street.
Renting space from Speedwell gave Wilbur and Orville time to find a permanent location. They didn’t have to look far. Straight out West Third, just a mile and a half from the bicycle shop and their home, a cornfield was ripe for development. It lay along Coleman Avenue between West Third and a line of the Cincinnati, Hamilton and Dayton Railway. Dayton was growing toward it from the east, closing the gap between the center city and the National Soldiers Home (now the Dayton VA Medical Center) less than a mile farther west.
The Wright brothers ordered construction of a 230- by 60- foot brick structure with a steel frame roof. The new building would give them half again more space than their Speedwell location and would meet their needs “until the business develops further,” Wilbur wrote in an August 29 letter to Russell Alger. Designed by Dayton architect William Earl Russ, the factory was a long, single-story brick building with arched parapets. Each side had a row of large windows, and skylights ran most of the length of the roof. The company had its first building up by November 1910. The company added a second, smaller building of matching style in 1911. Together, the two buildings enclosed 20,000 square feet with the capacity to produce four airplanes per month, or about one a week.5
Inside, the factory was “as businesslike and commonplace as a shoe factory,” Erwin Ellis wrote in the September 20, 1911 issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune. But the Wright Company factory had one thing you would never find in a shoe factory: a flight simulator. Its users included some of America’s most legendary aviation pioneers. Among them was Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, who would become the first U.S. Air Force chief of staff and the only air force general to wear five stars.
Arnold described the Wright Company’s primitive simulator in his autobiography Global Mission. Almost as soon as he arrived as a young army lieutenant in May 1911, his instructor took him to “a back room of the shop where an old plane was balanced on sawhorse supports so that the wingtips could move up and down.”
Taking the pilot’s position on the wing, students would practice working the controls. “No two types of controls were the same in those days,” Arnold wrote. He considered the Wright controls the most difficult of all. It used two levers, one on each side of the pilot. One moved fore and aft to move the elevator, which controlled pitch. The other also moved fore and aft, but it warped the wings for roll control. Attached to it was a handgrip to control the rudder.
Wright Company employee Ida Holgrave in the sewing department, 1911. She was one of America’s first female aerospace workers. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.
“This scarcely instinctive procedure had to be mastered before one could go into the air to be a Wright pilot,” Arnold wrote. He continued,
The old plane mounted on a sawhorse was how you began. The lateral controls were connected with small clutches at the wingtips, and grabbed a moving belt running over a pulley. A forward motion, and the clutch would snatch the belt, and down would go the left wing. A backward pull, and the reverse would happen. The jolts and teetering were so violent that the student was kept busy just moving the lever back and forth to keep on an even keel. That was primary training, and it lasted for days.6
The factory was also where students learned how to maintain and repair their machines. As Arnold noted, “there were no crew chiefs nor aircraft mechanics in the Army in those days.”
Airplane production began during a boom time for Dayton. In 1910, the city was the forty-third largest in the United States by population and the fourth largest in Ohio. Its population of 116,577 people had swelled by 31,000 in a decade. In both size and economic impact, the Wright Company factory was small potatoes. But the nature of its business made it special. The chamber of commerce’s massive Dayton Industrial Exposition and Fall Festival in September was focused on the surging automobile industry, but it used aviation as a marketing tool. Advertisements placed in 150 newspapers across Ohio and Indiana featured a Wright Flyer and promised aerial activities under the direction of the Wright brothers.7
Thursday, September 22, was the expo’s “Aviation Day,” featuring a flight by Orville across the city from Huffman Prairie. As Milton described it in his diary, the flyer appeared in the sky about 5:00 p.m., some two thousand feet up. Factory whistles screamed to signal its approach, the Dayton Daily News reported. As the flyer passed overhead, “the faint crackling staccato of its unmuffled motor” reached the crowd below. Orville flew over his home, then along West Third to the city limits, apparently passing over the bicycle shop where they had invented the airplane and the site for their new factory. Climbing to four thousand feet, he turned east and followed the Mad River back to Huffman Prairie. “Many thousands saw him,” Milton wrote.8
Despite the factory’s ample capacity, production lagged. Instead of building an airplane a week, the factory completed and delivered only four airplanes to outside customers in the first half of 1911. It delivered two more to its own exhibition department in that period. Orders for six more were due in July, but only two airplanes were near to completion. “Work in the factory does not seem to move very fast,” Orville observed in a July 5 letter to Freedman.
A view of the general assembly department in the Wright Company factory, 1911. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.
The Wright brothers laid much of the blame on Frank Russell. Orville considered him lazy and vented about him in letters to his brother while Wilbur was in Europe to check on their foreign interests. “I can not see that Russell is showing any more initiative than he did last year. His ‘organization’ enables him to spend nearly all his time talking or visiting the field,” he complained in a May 23, 1911 letter to Wilbur. He continued the rant in a June 4 letter. Referring to the companies of rival Glenn Curtiss and Wright licensee W. Starling Burgess, he wrote, “Sales of machines have not been numerous lately. The Curtiss [and] Burgess people seem to be selling more than we are…I can’t see that Russell has done anything to push this end of the business.” Wilbur complained to Russell Alger in a September 29 letter that his cousin was “disturbing the general organization” of the company, as Alger acknowledged in an October reply.
There was little love lost between the Wright brothers and Frank Russell. Correspondence between the Wrights and Russell Alger hinted at friction in the first year. Russell Alger conceded his cousin wasn’t perfect, but he suggested the Wright brothers shared some of the blame. The brothers were “somewhat inclined to your own ideas,” he wrote to Wilbur in a November 17, 1910 letter, adding that suggestions for “in any way changing small engineering details would not be received with any too much enthusiasm by you and your brother.”
Frank Russell wanted to make a slew of changes, and not simply in small details. He wanted to increase production capacity, make the exhibition business more competitive, step up prosecution of the patent suits, expand the product line and promote the company, according to a letter he wrote to Freedman in July 1911. Russell blamed the slack delivery rate on a bottleneck in engine production and urged the addition of more manufacturing equipment. He also urged the company to hire a salesman to take over sales and publicity under Russell’s direction. “Up to this time there has been no systematic publication of news items either in trade papers or general publications. Our plant is the only complete aeroplane factory in America, yet the public knows little or nothing of our progress,” he complained in a July 28, 1911 letter to Freedman.
Russell also wanted the company to add floatplanes to its product line. “Sportsmen as well as the Government are insistent on our installing pontoons…The Curtis [sic] Company covers this field alone,” he wrote in the July 28 letter, and he added, “I think an aeroplane should be installed at some suitable locality and experimental work immediately commenced.”
Wright Company employees Dan Farrell, Frank M. Quinn and Bill Conover in the woodworking department. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.
Russell didn’t stick around long. The brothers notified Andrew Freedman in an October 4, 1911 letter that they were accepting his resignation effective January 1, 1912.
But the Wright brothers eventually did much of what Russell had suggested, including getting into the floatplane business. While some Wright history buffs believe the Wright Company’s first floatplane was the 1913 Model C-H, records show the company was developing a floatplane version of a Model B as early as 1911. Russell Alger also experimented with floats on his own Model B. A yachtsman, he had just built a country villa on the shore of Lake St. Clair at Grosse Point, east of Detroit. When Frank Russell left the Wright Company, he went to Michigan to help his cousin with his floatplane work before joining Burgess in Massachusetts, who was building Wright airplanes under license in his Marblehead plant.
Besides experimenting with different float designs, the Packard vice-president experimented with a crank starter to allow a pilot to start the plane’s engine while standing on one of its floats; starting it the usual way, by flipping the Model B’s rear-mounted propellers, wasn’t practical in the middle of a lake. Alger also experimented with a way to raise and lower the floats so the airplane could land on the ground with its runners if desired, as well as a way to raise and lower wheels. Either modification would have resulted in an amphibious Model B. Frank Coffyn, one of the Wright Company’s original exhibition team members, served as Alger’s test pilot. In an October 25 letter, he told Orville that Coffyn had carried Alger and Frank Russell together on a five-minute flight off the water.
Orville and Alger corresponded about their floatplane work. By the end of 1911, the Wright factory had several projects underway, all with a Model B floatplane in mind. One was a more powerful, six-cylinder engine that would use either a hand crank or a gasoline-powered auxiliary starter. Another was a plan for retractable wheels. Most striking was an advanced, multistep float intended to reduce drag for more efficient takeoffs. Archived photos show a Wright Model B in the factory mounted on twin floats with distinctive, sawtooth-like bottoms. Orville noted the wooden floats were heavier than he had hoped, mainly because of the white lead paint used to seal them.
Orville told Alger in a December 28 letter that the Wright Company hadn’t tested a plane on floats because “our river here is rather small for any very extensive experiments along this line”—a reference to the narrow, tree-lined Great Miami River. The lack of easy access to large bodies of water is likely why Frank Russell had suggested testing floatplanes “at some suitable locality.” But at the end of August 1912, Orville told Alger he had begun “a little experimenting” on the Great Miami south of Dayton.
Alger hoped their floatplanes would appeal to wealthy yachtsmen on the East Coast who were beginning to see floatplanes as the latest sport. So did Alpheus Barnes, the company’s treasurer in New York, who was close to the yachting scene on Long Island. Coffyn, son of a New York banker himself, took Alger’s Model B floatplane to New York in the winter of 1912. Undeterred by the weather, Coffyn made headlines through February with daring flights off the icy, choppy Hudson River at Brooklyn. He managed to fly through the winter without a serious mishap, but he was seriously injured in a car accident in March. Alger sold his Model B to Coffyn out of sympathy, hoping it would help him get back on his feet by winning some prizes in an upcoming floatplane race in New York.
The Wright Company received orders with cash deposits for floatplanes as early as January 1912. Barnes relayed the names of several East Coast men who wanted one. The Glenwood Country Club at Glen Head, Long Island, formed an aviation committee that envisioned a row of hangars along the water for its members’ floatplanes, according to an article in the September 1912 issue of Aeronautics. It built a hangar and launching ramp for a Wright Company plane. Charles Wald, a New York resident who had taken some flying lessons at Huffman Prairie, returned to Dayton in June to complete his training and then went back to Glen Head to demonstrate the floatplane—an old Model B on the company’s new floats. Wald also was to operate a Wright flying school at Hempstead Plains, a natural prairie on Long Island that had become a hotbed of flying. The army also took an interest in floatplanes for coastal defense; it ordered one floatplane each from the Wright, Burgess and Curtiss companies.
A Wright Model B Flyer on twin pontoons in its hangar at Glen Head, New York. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.
Wald made several flights with the floatplane and carried a few passengers in September and October. He had his best and worst day on October 10. At 4:00 p.m., he flew to the rescue of Walter Strobach, an inexperienced swimmer from Flatbush who had capsized his rowboat in Hempstead Harbor. Wald pulled him from the water and flew him back to shore. The aerial rescue merited a brief story in the New York Times. But that evening, a flight with a newspaper correspondent ended badly when the plane flipped over on touchdown. Wald and the reporter apparently were uninjured, but that ended the Wright Company’s floatplane flying at Glen Head.9
One reason for lackluster sales was that competition was already in place by the time the Wright brothers had formed their company. The competitor was someone they had met a few years earlier: Glenn Curtiss.
Born on May 21, 1878, in Hammondsport, New York, Curtiss was eleven years younger than Wilbur and seven years younger than Orville, but he shared their fascination with mechanical devices, bicycles and speed. He opened a bicycle shop in 1900 and soon began designing and building motorized bikes. While the Wright brothers were inventing the airplane, Curtiss was winning races and setting speed records on his motorcycles. His light but powerful motorcycle engines drew the interest of commercial balloonist Thomas Scott Baldwin, who bought one for his dirigible, the California Arrow. Suddenly Curtiss was in the aviation business, making engines for Baldwin and other lighter-than-air pilots.10
Charles Wald reenacts a water rescue with a Wright Model B floatplane at Glen Head, New York. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.
Curtiss had written to the Wright brothers in May 1906 about his lightweight engines. Already making their own, the brothers weren’t interested. The brothers finally met their future rival in September 1906 when they went to see Baldwin and his famous airship at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds. Baldwin had summoned Curtiss there to work on the engine. The brothers invited Baldwin and Curtiss to visit their bicycle shop, where Curtiss is said to have peppered them with questions. Years later, Baldwin said the Wrights gave Curtiss access to their data and freely answered his questions. Curtiss put his new knowledge to quick use. Just over a week later, he sent the brothers a letter in which he described how he had modified the propeller blades on Baldwin’s dirigible to improve their performance.11
More alarming was the June Bug, the biplane that Curtiss built and flew on July 4, 1908, to win the Scientific American trophy for the first one-kilometer public flight in America. Instead of warping wings, the June Bug had hinged control surfaces on the wingtips called ailerons. The Wright brothers still considered it an infringement, as Orville warned him in a letter on July 20. Undeterred, Curtiss joined with Augustus Herring to form the Herring-Curtiss Company in February 1909. They produced the Golden Flier, a biplane with the ailerons mounted between the wings. Curtiss sold it on June 26 to the Aeronautic Society of New York. It was the first commercial sale of an airplane in the United States; Wilbur and Orville had yet to form their own company.
Curtiss was already showing his quickness and drive. He had made the first public flight in America, formed the first production company and made the first commercial airplane sale. Of course, he had the benefit of the Wright brothers’ research and no great secrets of his own to make him cautious. But Grover Cleveland Loening, who would work under Orville and later get to know Curtiss, saw them as two very different types: “Curtiss was a promoter with vision; Wright was an engineer and a scientist,” he wrote in his book Takeoff into Greatness: How American Aviation Grew So Big, So Fast.
In August, Wilbur sued the Herring-Curtiss Company and Curtiss for infringement, and he sued the Aeronautic Society of New York to prevent it from flying the Curtiss machine. It was the beginning of a contentious period of lawsuits and legal maneuvering that became known as the patent wars. The Wright brothers also sued two prominent aviators for flying unlicensed foreign airplanes they had brought into the country, and they sued exhibitors who allowed unlicensed fliers to compete without paying the Wright Company a fee. They were high-profile cases that would split public opinion over whether the Wright brothers were simply protecting their rights or trying to monopolize the aviation industry. Many would blame Wilbur and Orville for retarding aeronautical advancement in the United States—a strange accusation considering the Wright Company steadily lost ground to Curtiss and others.
The most important case was the Wright brothers’ suit against Herring-Curtiss and Glenn Curtiss. When he filed the lawsuit, Wilbur also asked for a preliminary injunction to prevent Curtiss from using the technology in their patent until the case was decided. It was a complex case and likely to take months or years to adjudicate; without an injunction, Curtiss would be free to compete just as the airplane market was emerging. On January 3, 1910, Judge John R. Hazel in the U.S. Circuit Court in Buffalo granted the injunction. In The Bishop’s Boys, Crouch wrote it was uncommon to grant an injunction in such thorny cases, but Hazel found the evidence already at hand was compelling.
The directors of Herring-Curtiss folded the company, but Glenn Curtiss formed a new one and pressed on, appealing the injunction. On June 14, the Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Hazel’s decision and dismissed the injunction. Curtiss was free to continue making and selling airplanes; convinced he would eventually prevail, he did just that.
Wilbur directed the Wright Company’s legal battle, beginning a struggle that would consume the rest of his days. He couldn’t have dreamed he had less than two years to live.