9

ORVILLE’S COMPANY

Now Orville was left to run the company and defend its patents without his older brother. Faced with the biggest loss in his life, he seemed unable to act. The company’s directors wanted to see new products and a stronger sales program. But correspondence and Wright Company board minutes indicate Orville wasn’t attending board meetings and was doing little to develop new airplanes. It took him more than a year to hire a replacement for Frank Russell.

Some believed Orville’s inaction resulted at least in part from personal struggles. Grover Loening, the young aeronautical engineer Orville finally put in Russell’s place, thought Orville “seemed somewhat lost” in the wake of Wilbur’s death. Before Loening reported to Dayton in July 1913, Alpheus Barnes met with him in New York and warned him Orville seemed all but unable to make decisions without his elder brother. According to Loening’s book Takeoff into Greatness, Barnes told him, “Ever since Orville succeeded him as president, we really have no boss.”

Loening also learned Orville’s sciatica, his old injury from the Fort Myer crash, was flaring up and wearing him down. The truth was probably even worse, given Orville’s undiagnosed hip injuries. Travel and even standing for very long was tiring and painful—another reason to loathe bumpy train rides to New York for company business.

Orville might have been following his late brother’s business strategy. Wilbur never seemed under the illusion that airplanes could become a volume business. Back in Paris in 1907, his advice to Orville and Hart Berg had been to “sell few machines at a big profit.”¹

Orville Wright stands in the Great Miami River south of Dayton with a Wright Model CH Flyer. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.

But their loss of the injunction against Curtiss in 1910 meant the Wright Company couldn’t control the marketplace. Wilbur saw no hope for growing the company and paying off their investors as long as the patent suit remained unresolved. An economic recession that gripped the country throughout 1910 and 1911 must have been discouraging as well. “Their chance to make a big profit vanished when the injunction was dissolved,” he wrote to Orville on June 30, 1911. He suggested what amounted to a survival strategy: cut costs to the bone and simply “keep the company financially sound till our competitors are ‘busted.’ Then our company can do a modest business sufficient to pay reasonable interest and our responsibility [to investors] will be ended.” Wilbur made his gloomy assessment even as the company was finishing its second factory building.

The Wright Company had folded its exhibition department, but former Wright exhibition pilots and other celebrities continued to die conspicuously, many in Wright airplanes. Cal Rodgers died in April 1912. Parmelee died on June 2 in North Yakima, Washington, before an exhibition crowd that included his fiancée. Al Welsh and his passenger, Lieutenant Leigh Hazelhurst, died nine days later. Howard Gill died in September 1912, when another plane struck his during a pylon race at Cicero Field in Chicago.

Arthur L. “Al” Welsh and George William Beatty at the Wright Flying School on Long Island in 1911. George Grantham Bain Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Even Huffman Prairie wasn’t immune to the carnage. Fred J. Southard, an apparently hopeless student from Minneapolis who had bought his own airplane, grew defiant after weeks of hearing instructors tell him he wasn’t ready to solo. Early on May 21, 1912, he stole onto the prairie and broke into the hangar. He rolled out his airplane, fired it up and took it aloft—promptly stalling and stuffing it into the ground.²

The Wright Company’s directors didn’t help matters. In the wake of Wilbur’s death, they elected Orville president in June—with the request “to not do any flying, at least for the present,” Orville informed Alger in a June 26 letter. Leaked to the press, the board’s sudden fear of flying “had about as detrimental an effect upon amateur flying as anything I have seen,” Russell Alger observed in a July 1 reply to Orville.

The death toll continued to climb. In an article on October 16, 1912, the New York Times reported two hundred fatal mishaps worldwide, with the United States second only to France in aviation mortality.

On October 26, Orville told Alger the string of fatal accidents “had a very depressing effect on the business this year. We had a number of sales practically completed which were lost as a result of the accidents.” Thanks to government sales, Orville predicted a third year of dividends for the company’s stockholders, but he added, “I think it quite probable that for the next year or two, we will have to depend almost entirely on the government business.”

To at least some company directors, the one bright spot in the civilian market was floatplanes. Curtiss’s floatplanes were catching on among wealthy sport pilots, and the government was showing interest as well. Alger had been doing his own floatplane experiments since 1911. The next summer, Barnes made arrangements to open the floatplane school at the Glenwood Country Club. Freedman hoped getting into the floatplane business would show the Wright Company was still a force in the market. He was urging Barnes, he told Orville in a July 26 letter, to push the floatplane school “in order that it will not appear that we have lost interest in the development of aviation.”

Orville wasn’t ignoring the floatplane market, or the development of new products. Before Wilbur’s death, he had been working on a number of advancements that applied to floatplanes—from retractable wheels, innovative stepped floats and auxiliary starters to a muffled six-cylinder engine, an automatic stabilizer and an angle-of-attack gauge. The company offered its unique floats alone or as an option on the Model B.

But its entry into the floatplane market was a fiasco. At Glen Head, Wald—sent there directly from the Huffman Prairie school with no floatplane experience—made just thirteen flights before flipping over in the water and nearly drowning himself and his passenger. The Glen Head school closed without selling a flying lesson or an airplane.³

A Wright Model B Flyer with twin, multi-step pontoons in the Wright Company factory. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.

It didn’t end the company’s interest in floatplanes. Orville began testing floatplanes on the Great Miami River south of Dayton near Sellar’s Road, not far from where Moraine Air Park is today. (Along the bicycle trail that skirts the east bank of the river in West Carrollton, you can find a wayside sign that marks the site of what a nonprofit group of the same name calls the “Wright Seaplane Base.”)

Orville also hired Grover Loening, a young engineer with some floatplane experience. Loening had become the first engineering student in the country to receive a master’s degree in aeronautics. After graduating from Columbia University, he had worked for a small New York airplane company and experimented with a flying boat of his own design. He had been corresponding with the Wright brothers since 1910 and inquiring about a job since 1911. Orville gave him Frank Russell’s old job.

By the time Loening came on board, Orville was completing the Wright Company’s first dedicated floatplane model, the C-H. Initially it had long, twin pontoons, but testing revealed handling problems in the air. The final version had a single, ten-foot by six-foot wooden pontoon mounted under the runners, with small pontoons under the wingtips and tail. Although photos and drawings show only seats for two, aviation journals reported Orville flew the C-H with as many as three passengers, including his assistant “Taylor”—presumably Charles—as well as Taylor’s son and another adult.

But the C-H followed the general pattern of the original Kitty Hawk flyer of 1903: the pilot rode in the open between two wings. Well before the C-H came out, Curtiss was flying seaplanes, or “flying boats”—aircraft with boat-like hulls instead of floats. The November 2012 issue of Aeronautics predicted, “Yachting with the flying boat is destined to be the greatest of sports.” The C-H was outdated before the first one left the factory.⁴

Loening defended the C-H in the September 1913 issue of Aircraft, praising it as an airplane “of remarkable efficiency and airworthiness” while criticizing flying boats—even as he worked on his own flying boat design for the Wright Company. By the following June, he was hailing the new Model G Aeroboat as “exceedingly boat-like in appearance.”⁵

Visually, the G was a striking departure from earlier Wright airplanes. The hull enclosed the engine in its nose and partially enclosed the side-by-side occupants. In a first for the Wright product line, it offered a control wheel as an option to the traditional levers. But the Aeroboat still used the Kitty Hawk–style propulsion system—chain driven pusher propellers, turned by a long drive shaft that ran under the seats. One innovation was a flexible drive coupling to reduce vibration and wear on the long shaft.⁶

A Wright Model G seaplane over the Miami River, circa 1914. George Grantham Bain Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

A wheel-type control system on a Wright Model G Flyer. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.

It isn’t clear how much influence Loening had on the company. He stayed only a year. In Takeoff into Greatness, Loening wrote he found himself caught between two imposing company officers—Orville and Barnes, who began making extended visits to the Wright Company factory after Wilbur’s death. Barnes had little regard for Orville or what he called “these Ohio hicks,” according to Loening; Orville considered Barnes a meddling nuisance. Sensing that anything he did to please one boss would anger the other, Loening left in July 1914 to become chief aeronautical engineer for the Army’s Aviation Section.

As the aviation industry developed, the Wright Company’s product line fell rapidly behind the state of the art. Every Wright airplane was a derivative of the original flyer, with warping wings and chain-driven pusher propellers, while the market began to favor tractor propellers, ailerons and other refinements. Most damaging to the company was the notorious Model C.

The Model C was essentially a Model B with a more refined design and a more powerful engine. The Wright Company sold five Model Cs to the army as “weight carriers,” able to carry a pilot, a passenger and enough fuel for a four-hour flight. Welsh and Hazelhurst died while testing the first one at College Park; the Wright Company furnished a replacement.

Their crash was just the beginning of a grim period for the Wright Company. Between September 1912 and February 1914, eight army officers died in seven Wright airplanes—two Model Bs and five Cs. A non-fatal crash destroyed another Model C in 1913. In less than two years, the army lost all six Model Cs in crashes, and in that period the Model C alone accounted for half of all army pilot fatalities in heavier-than-air machines.⁷

The death rate alarmed the army. Orville, while calling the loss of life “most distressing,” didn’t think it was out of proportion to death rates in France or Germany. He also maintained that “more than ninety percent” of the crashes resulted from stalling. In a December 5, 1913 letter to Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Reber, Orville defended the Model C as “the best machine and the safest machine we have built,” but that its greater power and maneuverability “tend to make the aviators careless” about avoiding stalls.

But an army board recommended limiting flying operations to certain airplanes, all tractor-propelled types—in effect condemning all Wright airplanes, since they all used pusher propellers. At the same time it opened the door to fledgling California airplane maker Glenn L. Martin. With many of its airplanes crashed or grounded, the army turned to Martin to supply tractor-type training planes. Martin would prosper and eventually merge his business with the Wright Company.⁸

Orville claimed the army could “positively eliminate” nearly all the stalls its aviators were experiencing if they simply used a new device his company had introduced in 1913. It was the incidence indicator, an early angle-of-attack gauge whose sole purpose was to help pilots avoid stalls. The device used a simple air vane to move an arm on a dial, and it could be mounted on a wing strut where the pilot could see it. The idea seemed to draw limited interest at the time, but eventually angle-of-attack sensors with displays in the cockpit would become essential equipment in military and transport aircraft. In 2014, the Federal Aviation Administration strived to encourage more pilots to use angle of attack indicators by simplifying its rules for installing them in private airplanes.⁹

Another safety device the company introduced was the automatic stabilizer, which used a pendulum to sense if an airplane was tilting in pitch or roll and automatically adjusted the controls. The Wright brothers had worked on the design for years, applying for a patent in 1908. The Patent Office finally granted it in October 1913. After Orville demonstrated it on Huffman Prairie on December 31, 1913, the Aero Club of America awarded him its coveted Collier Trophy. In January 1914, Orville told the New York Times the stabilizer would “revolutionize flight” after it became available in the spring.

But Orville was wrong. In 1913, Lawrence Sperry, the son of Sperry Gyroscope founder Elmer Sperry, developed a gyroscope-based stabilizer for airplanes. A Curtiss flying school graduate, Sperry tested his invention in a Curtiss flying boat and flew it to win an Aero Club of France prize in 1914. It was a true breakthrough in the fields of stabilization and guidance, making long-distance flight and “blind flight” in clouds more practical. It instantly outdated the Wright device.¹⁰

On January 13, 1914, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals handed down its long awaited decision. It upheld the Wright patent. The decision echoed Judge Hand’s conclusion that the Wright brothers were “pioneers in the practical art of flying with heavier-than-air machines and that the claims should have a liberal interpretation.” Courts in Germany and France also eventually ruled in favor of the Wright brothers.

“This will give us an absolute monopoly, as there are no machines at the present time that do not infringe this claim,” Orville wrote to Andrew Freedman a week after the decision. Alpheus Barnes was ecstatic. “I feel sure things will now begin to hum,” he wrote to Loening on January 16.

Katharine and Orville in a Model H Flyer. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.

Loening knew what Barnes had in mind. “Barnes would daydream with me of what it would mean if the Wright Company were to win the suit,” Loening recalled in Our Wings Grow Faster. The company was poised to create a monopoly like that of Bell Telephone. “There were untold millions of dollars ready in New York to be invested in such a trust,” Loening wrote. Curtiss and the rest would be shut down or bought up, and the Wright Company would rule the industry.

But this wasn’t Orville’s idea of a monopoly. “With the winning of the suit, his revenge on Curtiss seemed satisfied, and all he wanted was tribute—royalties from everyone,” Loening wrote.

All along, the Wright brothers’ strategy had been to license manufacturers and collect a hefty 20 percent royalty for every machine produced, or about $1,000 on the typical $5,000 price of an airplane in those days. They intended to collect on every airplane produced because every airplane fell under the broad definitions in their patent. A few manufacturers, notably Burgess-Curtis, Inc. and Glenn Martin, paid licensing fees.

Curtiss tried to dodge the ruling by disconnecting the ailerons to make them operate separately. When Orville sued Curtiss again, Curtiss sought to make the case that the Wright flyer wasn’t the first machine capable of flight. As evidence, he claimed Langley’s Aerodrome, the houseboat-launched machine that had failed to fly in 1903, could have done so. Hoping to vindicate its late director, the Smithsonian loaned what remained of the Aerodrome to Curtiss and granted him $2,000 to restore and fly it. After major modifications, Curtiss coaxed the machine into the air for a few seconds. The Smithsonian put the modified Aerodrome on display, proclaiming it as the first airplane capable of flight. The Smithsonian’s support of Curtiss outraged Orville and sparked a feud that kept the 1903 Wright Flyer out of the Smithsonian until after his death.

With the patent tied up in court again, Curtiss continued to produce airplanes under the Curtiss Aeroplane Company. The unending litigation tarnished the Wright brothers’ reputations. While they enjoyed support from the hometown press, news coverage elsewhere was more critical. Even some historians describe the Wright brothers’ aggressive enforcement of their patents as “litigiousness.” And some critics blamed the patent suits for slowing American advancement in aviation. Nearly a year after the 1914 decision, a December 18 article in the New York Tribune complained that the industry’s dormancy continued because the “Wright-Curtiss fight has prevented manufacturers from extending their business and retarded development” throughout the United States.¹¹

Orville had made the same point as the Tribune just after the decision. A New York Times article said he called the long dispute with Curtiss “the one great cause for America’s continued backwardness in aviation development.” But Orville said it was the prospect of having to wage expensive legal marathons to enforce their patents, not a threat of monopolization, that deterred inventors from bringing out new ideas. Had the injunction handed down in 1910 held, “aviation would be upon a settled and stable basis,” the Times quoted him as saying.

Orville predicted the decision would allow aviation to advance rapidly. He told the Times he would soon introduce many improvements he had been keeping secret.

The improvements didn’t come right away. The 1913 Model F, built for the army, essentially was another Wright flyer with a fuselage. It featured a boat-like body with a metal shroud over the nose-mounted engine. The original design, credited to Loening, included two tractor propellers in front of the wings and tandem seating. But the model delivered to the army reverted to side-by-side seating and pusher propellers for better visibility. A review in the November 20, 1914 issue of the British journal Flight called it “still the Wright biplane of old.” The army dubbed it the “Tin Cow.” Oscar Brindley, a former Wright Company pilot who was working as a civilian instructor for the army, said it handled badly. The army accepted it but dropped it from its inventory in June 1915 after only seven flights. It was the only Model F the Wright Company built.¹²

But in 1914, the Wright Company’s product line began to change, and in just two years it cast aside the traditional Wright flyer features. That year it introduced its first seaplane: the Model G Aeroboat. While it retained the chain-driven pusher propellers and warping wings, the Aeroboat featured a stepped hull, nose-mounted engine and optional control wheel. The 1914 Model H and the slightly smaller 1915 HS had nose-to-tail wooden fuselages. The 1915 Model K seaplane was the first Wright airplane with ailerons and tractor propellers, although it still used the 1903-style chain drive. According to Roach, the single Model K the Wright Company delivered to the navy was the company’s only recorded sale of that model, although the navy had planned to buy up to nine aircraft. It was also the Wright Company’s last government sale.

Last came the Model L, developed as a military scout. The single-propeller, direct-drive tractor design had a box-shaped fuselage, squared-off wings, ailerons and a swiveling tailskid. It made a complete break from the traditional Wright airplanes, and it may have reflected many of the changes Orville hinted at in 1914. But it didn’t roll out until 1916, after Orville had sold the company. And it failed to close the gap with the competition.¹³

A Wright Model L Flyer. Note the nose-mounted propeller and ailerons. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.

A Wright Model F Flyer sits in the Wright Company factory. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.

The patent decision seemed to have little real impact on the Wright Company’s fortunes. Competitors continued to sell airplanes in growing numbers while the Wright Company’s production atrophied. A July 1915 Signal Corps report found Curtiss’s Buffalo plant led the industry in production, turning out 3 airplanes every two days on average. Burgess, by then a Curtiss subsidiary, was producing 15 to 20 airplanes per month in Marblehead. Martin was producing 10 a month in Los Angeles, and Thomas Brothers (later the better-known Thomas-Morse) was rolling out an equal number in Bath, New York. In contrast, the Wright Company factory’s entire output from the time it opened was only about 120 airplanes, according to an estimate by Orville in June 1915.¹⁴

The great monopoly of the Wright Company directors’ dreams simply never materialized. It “did not happen because of one man—Orville Wright,” Loening wrote in Our Wings Grow Faster. “He did not want to expand. He fought the New York interests.” Orville stymied the New York directors and then borrowed money to buy them out—all except Collier, a personal friend, who kept a 3 percent share of the company. The next year, Orville sold the company to a group of New York financiers, signing the deal on October 15, 1915. They didn’t disclose the selling price, but the October 14 New York Times, citing unnamed sources, initially reported it fetched $1.5 million. A November 16 article downgraded it to $500,000, plus a $25,000 annual salary to Orville as a consultant.

The Wright Company’s order book was empty, and its manufacturing capacity was unchanged from 1911. Its greatest value was the patent, which remained in force despite Curtiss’s legal maneuvering. It was a force the new company intended to use. “The new company will not hesitate to prosecute infringements of the patents,” it said in a statement reported in the Times’s October 14 article.¹⁵

For the Wright Company, it was the first in a series of acquisitions that would lead to the greatest irony in the history of aircraft manufacturing. In 1916, the Wright and Glenn L. Martin companies merged to form Wright-Martin Aircraft. It also purchased the Simplex Automobile Company. Glenn Martin left to form a new Glenn L. Martin Company in Cleveland in 1917, and Wright-Martin changed its name to the Wright Aeronautical Corporation in 1919. It ended airframe production to concentrate on engines, and a decade later it merged with the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company, creating—incredibly—the Curtiss-Wright Corporation. The New York–based company organized its product lines into two main divisions, with engines and propellers under Wright and aircraft under Curtiss. The Curtiss division had many other units as well. Curtiss-Wright is a much different company today, but it sustains the legacy of the two greatest names in American aviation history.

Aviation activity in Dayton faded, according to Roach in The Wright Company. The company’s new owners phased out manufacturing in the Dayton plant in 1916 and closed the flying school on Huffman Prairie. Only some experimental work continued in the factory until the Wright-Martin Company closed the plant in February 1917.

The U.S. aviation industry languished compared to the rapid growth and advancement in European countries. The reason had nothing to do with the Wright patents; the European powers and Great Britain were funding research, development and manufacturing in preparation for war. When the fighting began in 1914, Germany’s budget for military aviation was $45 million, Russia’s was $22.5 million, France’s was $12 million and Great Britain’s was just over $1 million. In contrast, the 1915 appropriation for U.S. Army aviation was $250,000. Its fleet numbered twenty-three airplanes.

America entered World War I in April 1917 with an army fleet of 132 airplanes, none combat-ready. Politicians and pundits raised a national outcry over the nation’s lack of air power. Government funding for aircraft production exploded. The 1917 aviation act included $640 million for army aviation—roughly $15 billion in 2014 dollars. But manufacturers balked, pointing to the still unsettled patent situation. At the government’s urging, the principal aircraft manufacturers came together and within weeks hammered out a cross-licensing deal for aviation patents. They assigned its management to a new industry group, the Manufacturers Aircraft Association (MAA). In a nutshell, the deal allowed association members to produce airplanes for a modest licensing fee. The MAA’s first president was the former Wright Company manager, Frank Russell.¹⁶

Orville with his beloved pet Scipio. Orville acquired the St. Bernard in 1917. Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Almost in the blink of an eye, the costly, years-long legal fight over the Wright airplane patent ended. Without the urgency of war, the patent dispute might have dragged on a few more years until the patent expired. But without the sudden flood of government dollars for military aircraft, it isn’t clear what difference it would have made. In the long run, if Orville was right about the toll the patent war took on his brother, then its biggest impact on aviation progress might have been in causing Wilbur’s untimely death and ending the Wright brothers’ historic collaboration.

With the company sold, Orville moved out of the bicycle shop and into a new laboratory at 15 North Broadway Street, just off West Third. The single-story brick building had a large workroom and an office. Orville equipped it with a wind tunnel and designed instruments similar to those of the 1901 tunnel, which he considered superior to those in use by other research labs.

Orville wasn’t quite out of the aviation business. Edward Deeds, Dayton industrialist and Orville’s friend, had formed the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO) with Charles Kettering and the Dayton Metal Products Company with Kettering and the Talbotts, Harold Senior and Junior. When Wright-Martin exited Dayton, Deeds and his friends formed the Dayton Airplane Company. They recruited Orville as a director and consulting engineer and renamed it the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company.

With America’s entry into World War I, the sudden flood of military dollars rejuvenated Dayton’s aviation industry. But Deeds, not Orville, was the force behind it. Deeds had powerful military and political connections, and he soon had a commission as army colonel and an assignment as head of aircraft procurement. He cut his financial ties with Dayton-Wright and awarded massive production contracts to the company—a practice that led to calls for his court-martial but not formal charges. Dayton-Wright produced thousands of airplanes at its Moraine plant and acquired two more plants to produce parts. One was the old Wright Company factory. Deeds also persuaded the War Department to establish an army aviation training field, a supply depot and the army’s aeronautical research center in the Dayton area—major military missions the army eventually centralized at Wright-Patterson.

Although he was mainly viewed as a figurehead for Dayton-Wright, Orville conducted research for the company. In 1924, he shared an aviation patent for the split flap with a former Wright Company employee, James M.H. Jacobs. In later years, memories of the patent war faded. The aviation industry, America and most of the world revered Orville and the memory of Wilbur for their pioneering work. Orville lived quietly at Hawthorn Hill and worked in his laboratory until his death from a heart attack on January 30, 1948. He was seventy-seven.