Sunday, October 16, 1910
When the balloonists began arriving for their meeting with Albert Lambert shortly before ten A.M., the local papers were in the lobby of the Jefferson Hotel. One story dominated the morning news, encapsulated by the headline in the St. Louis Republic: WELLMAN’S AIRSHIP MAY BE DESTROYED BY TERRIFIC GALE. Alongside the bleak article was the photograph of Wellman and his crew taken twenty-four hours earlier, just before they climbed up the rope ladder into the car, and underneath was another, slightly smaller headline: 100 DEAD IN STORM THAT SWEEPS CUBA. The hurricane had ripped through the Carib bean on Friday, killing scores and causing over a million dollars’ worth of damage in Havana alone when seas broke through the city’s Malecón seawall. Now, the paper warned, the hurricane was tearing up the eastern coast and the America airship was slap bang in its path.
In the first hours after their departure from Atlantic City, everything had gone according to plan on board the America. Wellman stationed himself as lookout in the lifeboat, passing the time with Jack Irwin, the wireless operator, who had on two thick woolen earphone pads. The young Australian sent his first brief message at eleven A.M.: “We have sighted Long Island and are driving ahead into the northeast.” It was picked up by Robert Miller at the wireless station on Million Dollar Pier, where the families of the crew had assembled after the airship had disappeared from sight. Two hours later Irwin informed Miller that the fog was lifting, and at one P.M. he tapped out a message to their support team: “All did nobly. We are doing our best to repay you for your support.”
Up in the car Simon was delighted to find that steering a ship in the air was exactly the same as steering a ship in the water. He had cut two circular holes in the celluloid windows to enhance his field of vision, and with the fog now gone he had a magnificent view of the ocean. With Vaniman and his two assistants aft in the engine room, and Wellman and Irwin down below in the lifeboat, Simon was left alone with his thoughts. Conversation was all but impossible because of the noise of the motors, but a few minutes after midday the engines stopped. Vaniman shouted through the speaking tube that it was nothing to worry about, just a bit of sand in the motor. Fred Aubert took advantage of the pause to prepare a round of ham sandwiches, and Wellman asked Irwin to send progress reports to the London Daily Telegraph, the New York Times, and the Chicago Record-Herald.
The rest of the daylight hours had been unexceptional, but dusk revealed a disconcerting sight; illuminating the sky was a steady shower of red-hot sparks from the America’s exhaust. The fireworks display was pretty, but if just one stray spark landed in some cranny of the airship, they would be blown to kingdom come. Wellman had rushed into the engine room, but Vaniman had just shrugged and reassured his skipper that they were perfectly safe. Then at eight P.M., as fog thickened, Simon heard a shout from Wellman through the speaking tube that connected the car to the lifeboat: “Ship ahead!” Simon peered through his two small, circular holes and just made out a large, four-masted schooner not more than a hundred yards away. The vessel was the Boston-registered Bullard, bound for Norfolk and skippered by Captain Sawyer, who had heard of Wellman but had no idea the epic quest was under way. He and his crew thought the light they could see bearing down on them came from a mast of a large steamer, so they “ran about shouting and yelling . . . hoping that its lookout might see us in time to avoid a collision.”
As the sound of the airship’s engines grew louder, Sawyer and his men still couldn’t see the ship that they now felt certain was going to run them down. The skipper later confessed there had been pandemonium on deck as they braced themselves for the collision. And then suddenly, “out of the darkness and mist shot a big aerial phantom . . . the thing was such a big surprise for all hands that we were knocked off our pins.” The sailors dropped to their knees, clasped their hands in prayer, and looked up in terror as the airship passed above them. Over the noise of the engines, Sawyer also heard the airship scraping the topmasts as she veered away. Up in the car Simon knew they had come perilously close to death, but the Englishman in him couldn’t resist making light of the incident in his log: “I don’t suppose they had heard about us, and I would like to hear their remarks now!”
In the early hours of Sunday the America pushed on east at a steady 15 miles an hour. They were on schedule to fulfill Wellman’s prediction of reaching England in ten days. At four A.M. the engines were turned off and everyone—save the lookout—got his head down for a couple of hours’ rest. Simon crawled into his hammock after a twenty-hour shift, “too tired even to dream,” and fell asleep in seconds as the airship drifted peacefully northeast.
Wellman shook Simon awake. The two-hour sleep had felt more like two minutes, but the anticipation of another day’s adventure quickly swept the fatigue from his body. As Simon sat down at the controls, Vaniman started the motors and they were on their way once more. By eight A.M. the fog had thinned and Simon spotted a fishing boat, and the ripples of shoal water underneath, “which proved we were in Martha’s Vineyard, which is between Nantucket Lightship and the mainland.” Wellman was cock-a-hoop when he learned of their position. There would be no humiliation in pulling up short on the coast of New En-gland, and now the broad Atlantic stretched before them. He told Aubert to cook breakfast and to be sure to make it a good one: ham, eggs, and strong coffee all round. Simon reckoned it the finest breakfast he had had in a long time, one that fed his morale as much as his stomach. The biggest unknown before their voyage had been the America’s engines, but they had been faultless in the twenty-four hours since their departure. Why shouldn’t they remain so? For the first time, Simon succumbed to temptation and pictured the faces of his friends and family when he arrived in England.
It was around ten A.M.—just as the balloonists sat down with Albert Lambert in St. Louis’s Jefferson Hotel—when things started to go wrong for the America. Since dawn the weather had been becoming ever more aggressive, but now the breeze was a wind and heavy gusts from the southwest struck the airship. Each blow sent the craft shooting forward at an alarming speed as the equilibrator “jumped from wave to wave, fifty to eighty feet each leap.” Sometimes the equilibrator dived beneath the ocean, and the airship’s cables were pulled taut for a few seconds until it leaped clear. Then the sudden release of tension sent the car rocking from side to side with Simon struggling to remain upright in his seat. He looked fearfully around him as the car creaked and groaned with every fresh gust. Huddled in the bowels of the lifeboat, Wellman and Jack Irwin felt themselves drop ever closer to the whitecapped waves of the Atlantic.
If the lifeboat hit the surface, they knew it would be torn loose from its shackles, portending a miserable end to their adventure, and their lives. It was too dangerous to try to climb back into the car with the wind so strong, so through the speaking tube Wellman ordered the crew to lighten the craft’s load. Vaniman and this team of engineers jettisoned some gasoline, and for a while the America regained its buoyancy. “It’s a pity to see that good fuel going to waste,” Simon wrote in his log, “but we have to do it to save the ship.” Then he added as an afterthought, “I would like to have some of those longshore ‘old women’ here with us now.”
At noon they dumped more gasoline to lighten the sagging America, but by two o’clock on Sunday afternoon they had passed through the eye of the storm, and a relieved Wellman and Irwin scurried up the ladder into the car. The strain of the last few hours was etched into every one of their faces, and Vaniman in particular seemed upset by their tribulation.
Wellman asked Simon for an estimate of their position, and he replied that they had covered 140 miles since the sighting of the fishing boat at eight A.M. In the last couple of hours they had been pushed northeast and were drawing near to the transatlantic shipping lanes. Vaniman gave a nervous cry and asserted that the time had come to issue a Mayday over the wireless and to then launch the lifeboat. Wellman disagreed, accepting that while they didn’t now have enough gasoline to get them across the ocean, they could still make a run for England if the wind changed to out of the west. Vaniman laughed, a short disbelieving laugh, and challenged his captain to put it to the vote. Wellman turned to the first man, Lewis Loud, and asked if he wished to abandon ship or remain aloft.
“Let’s stick by the ship,” said Loud.
“I am with you for fighting it out,” said Simon.
“So am I,” said Irwin.
“And I, too,” said Aubert.
To lift the spirits of the crew Wellman told Aubert to rustle up a hot meal. Later, as they sat back replete and momentarily relaxed, Aubert spoke wistfully to Simon of his girlfriend. How he wished he were back in Atlantic City, the two of them on the hotel veranda holding hands. He looked Simon in the eye and asked, “What our are chances?”
“Very good,” replied Simon with a reassuring smile.
Darkness brought a drop in temperature and in height as the cold contracted the airship’s gas. As they began to dip toward the sea, Wellman ordered the smallest of the three motors, the twelve-horsepower donkey engine, to be broken up and heaved overboard along with more gasoline. Then he joined Irwin in the lifeboat, and for a long time the pair crouched in the swaying vessel trying to establish contact with a shore station or passing ship. Frequently they heard their signal letter Wrepeated over the airwaves, but they were out of range to reply. All they could do was listen impotently as ships flashed back the same message to one another: “Any news of the America?”
Exasperated, Wellman began to climb the ladder to the car. Suddenly his sheath knife snagged on one of the rungs, and as he tried to free himself, he slipped, losing grip with both hands and feet. Only the jammed knife prevented his falling into the ocean. It felt to Wellman that his legs dangled a long time above the Atlantic, but in seconds Loud and Aubert reached down and hauled him up. For a minute or so no one spoke as they all recovered their breath, then the two engineers began to laugh. Simon joined in, and so did Wellman, his relief giving way to exhilaration at his narrow escape. “This crew seems to be made up of the right kind of men,” wrote Simon in his log, shortly after he came off duty, “and I never wish to be shipmates with a better bunch.”
When the meeting of the balloonists at the Jefferson Hotel broke up at lunchtime, there was, to the undisguised relief of Albert Lambert, unanimity, with not a disgruntled European to be seen or heard. They had all agreed on the definition of a landing during the race, and Lambert dispatched one of his assistants to type out a press release on the subject:
• If the basket touches the ground, a landing is made.
• If the drag rope becomes entangled in trees or trails along the ground for fifteen minutes, a landing is constituted.
• If a balloon alights in a lake or a river, a landing is made.
• If a balloon descends in salt water, it is disqualified.
Lambert had also happily informed the ten teams that the Laclede Gas Light Company had agreed to reschedule the inflation of the balloons from Sunday afternoon to early Monday morning. This news, coupled with the announcement that the winner of the race would receive $2,000, the runner-up $1,500 and the third-place balloon $1,250, sent the balloonists off to lunch in great cheer. One of the French competitors, Walther de Mumm, a scion of the champagne family, produced a couple of bottles with which they celebrated a harmonious morning’s work.
After lunch the men retired to their rooms and the comfort of soft beds and clean linen. All of the ten two-man crews were experienced balloonists, gloomily aware that that they might not get the chance to lay their head on a feather pillow for several days.
If the men couldn’t sleep, then they checked and rechecked their provisions and equipment. Had they the right quantity of coffee and an adequate number of canned soups? Would it be better to take more apples and fewer oranges? Should they pack a quart of whiskey or a bottle of crème de menthe? They cleaned their revolvers for the umpteenth time, made sure they had the correct maps, included a spare pair of gloves ( just to be safe), and laid out on the floor of their room the most precious items of all: barometer, thermometer, compass, barograph, and an air-recording aneroid barometer. They lovingly cleaned and polished each one, then repacked them in their cases.
A little while later they’d unpack everything and do it all again, just to occupy their minds and ward off the inevitable feelings of apprehension that collected in the hollows of their imaginations like pockets of mist on a fall morning. As one of the American entrants busied himself on Sunday afternoon, he stoutly refused to entertain thoughts of the fate that had befallen him in the 1908 International Balloon Cup race. Instead, thirty-six-year-old Augustus Post, copilot to Alan Hawley in the balloon America II, pored over a large map of the Great Lakes region, supplied to him the previous week by Major Hersey of the Milwaukee Weather Bureau.
Post was handsome, with black hair and eyes and a goatee that made him look more like a French musketeer than an American balloonist. His personality was just as exotic. He was a poet, raconteur, singer, an entertainer who could imitate the sounds of everything from airplanes to canaries, and an actor who had appeared in theaters across America.
Having graduated from Harvard Law School, Post had returned to his native New York City and bought a Waverley electric car, reputed to be the city’s first horse less carriage. A few years later at the 1900 Paris Exhibition he took to the air for the first time in a balloon, and in 1905 Post became not only one of the founding members of the Aero Club of America, but also its first secretary. Among his friends he counted the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss, and that fact alone—his ability to be on good terms with these implacable enemies—was proof of his affability. Everyone liked Augustus Post, except his estranged wife, Emma, who in October 1910 was waiting for their marriage to be annulled in a New York court. To her, Post was nothing but a showboater, a man who “loved the limelight . . . [and] the society of other women.”
Post wasn’t troubled by his wife’s vow to squeeze him for every last penny. What ever happened, it couldn’t be worse than what he’d experienced on October 11, 1908.
There were many ways to die in a balloon, as the New York Times had insensitively pointed out in July 1910 when it listed the thirty-five fatalities in the last four years. One could drown, as Paul Nocquet had in April 1906 when his balloon dropped into Gilgo Bay in Long Island; one might be struck by lightning, as poor Lieutenant Ulivelli was near Rome in 1907; one could explode in a ball of fire as two British balloonists had during an exhibition in London in 1908; or one might be swept out to sea, to vanish forever, as was the case with Frank Elkins in 1909, last seen heading out over the Pacific Ocean.
Perhaps the most terrifying prospect of all was the plummet, the sudden fall from the sky with the balloonists powerless to do anything but scream. Aviators could, at least, struggle with the controls of their machine, allowing themselves a sliver of a sense that their fate was in their own hands.
When Augustus Post had been invited by Holland Forbes to be his copilot in the 1908 International Balloon Cup race, Post had accepted without hesitation. Forbes was a good man in Post’s estimation, the vice president of the Aero Club of America, and an accomplished sportsman who owned his own balloon, the Conqueror. The pair sailed to Germany, spending much of the voyage with their heads in a series of foreign-language phrase books they had been sent by the race organizers. Taking off from Berlin, the contestants were liable to end up anywhere from Scandinavia to the Sahara, so it was advisable to be as much of a polyglot as possible.
The day of the race was a Sunday, warm and sunny, and Berlin was teeming with spectators. The Conqueror was the ninth balloon to start, and at 3:40 P.M. it rose into the air to a great cheer. When the balloon reached four thousand feet, Post noted the height in his logbook and also entered the barometer reading. He heard Forbes cluck with delight and say, “How nicely it works!” Suddenly Post felt the basket tremble. He looked up and saw the bottom of the balloon beginning to shrivel as a large tear appeared on one side of the varnished cotton. “She’s gone,” said Post calmly. As the gas rushed out of the tear “like the blowing off of a steam boiler,” Post jumped to his feet and reached for the appendix cord, a rope that acted as a safety mechanism and tightened if pressure was lost so the balloon would keep its shape and not fold up. But the appendix cord hadn’t been designed for such a catastrophe as they now faced. With the balloon holed, turning it into a giant parachute was their only small chance of survival. Post slipped the cord through its knot and it rose inside to the top of the balloon.
To the tens of thousands of spectators on the ground death appeared assured. A woman standing close to the correspondent from the New York Times screamed, “They are killed!” and turned her face from the sky. The reporter watched transfixed as for two thousand feet they “shot down like a bullet.” In the basket Forbes began to cut away the bags of ballast sand that hung from the four corners in a pathetic attempt to halt their descent. Post queried, what about the spectators below, might not they be hit by falling bags? Forbes ignored Post and continued to offload their ballast. Post looked up at the balloon, begging it to come to their aid, and suddenly it did. The New York Times reporter gasped with thousands of others as “the envelope appeared to take, first, a triangular shape, and then was transformed into a sort of parachute at the top of the net, and the progress of the wrecked balloon was considerably arrested.” Post and Forbes felt they were under a large mushroom as the netting over the balloon held firm against the cloth, which struggled to get through its meshes. They were no longer traveling at the speed of a bullet, but as the wind pushed them away from the field toward the city, it seemed to Post “as if some great giant was hurling buildings, streets, churches, up at us with all his might.” For several moments they skimmed the rooftops of first one street, then another, with Post and Forbes clinging for dear life to the concentrating ring above their heads. The basket smashed at an angle into a chimney, bounced upward, and dropped through the tiled roof of No. 7 Wilhelmstrasse in the suburb of Friedenau. Neither man dared move in case their descent had been only temporarily checked. Warily they got to their knees and peered over the basket’s rim. They appeared to be stuck fast in a hole in the roof with the cloth draped over the chimney. Forbes clambered out onto the flat roof, unslung his camera, and started to take some photographs: of the balloon, of the house, of Berlin. “The whole world,” he had decided, “looked beautiful.”
It was the last time Augustus Post had worked with Forbes, a balloonist Post had come to realize was dangerously cavalier. One of the sandbags cut from their basket had landed on a baby carriage, and only the infant’s nurse’s quick grab of the child in it moments before the impact had prevented a ghastly accident. Moreover, why had the balloon dropped in the first place? When the pair arrived home a fortnight after their miraculous escape, Post refused to comment on the incident but his partner had plenty to say to the press. “It is inexplicable to me why the balloon should burst,” Forbes told reporters on the quayside. “None of the aeronautical experts to whom we referred the matter can find any reason for it.” Then he embellished the story with an untrue account of their crashing through a roof and finding themselves in a woman’s boudoir. “The lady,” he said with a chortle, “was unfortunately out.”
Unbeknownst to Forbes, Gaston Hervieu, a respected French balloonist, had widely been quoted in the American press attributing the calamity to “the length of the appendix, which increased the pressure at the top of the balloon and caused it to burst. I consider such experiments dangerous before proper experience has been acquired.” In other words, Forbes had recklessly endangered his life and Post’s with his foolish tampering.
Post’s enthusiasm for aeronautics hadn’t dimmed with his near-death experience, but he vowed to choose his partners with more circumspection. In one of the many articles he wrote for aviation publications, Post declared, “The successful make-up of a team in a long-distance balloon-race depends on many qualifications, mental almost more than physical. For many hours perhaps, two men, cut loose from the earth, sharing a profound solitude, must have one mind and one motive, and must act instinctively with a precision that admits of no hesitation and no discussion . . . Your companion must be one with whom you are willing to share a great memory—and that is in itself something of a test of one’s opinion.”
By the summer of 1910 Post was as much an aviator as he was a balloonist. Earlier in the year he had become the thirteenth American to solo in an airplane, and he had not long acquired his flying license when Alan Hawley appeared at the door of his Manhattan apartment.
Hawley had a job persuading Post to join him as his copilot in the balloon America II. Even though they had flown together—and finished fourth—in the 1907 International Balloon Cup race, Post now had other ambitions. He was about to journey to Boston to compete in the Boston Air Show, and was of half a mind to enter the Chicago to New York airplane race, for which the prize was $25,000.*
Hawley lacked Post’s flamboyance. Where one had an exotic goatee, the other had a modest mustache. Post was a poet and an actor, a man who went running each day to keep in shape; Hawley was a sober-suited stockbroker, less impulsive and more cerebral than his friend, and his portly frame betrayed his fondness for a long lunch. The two were opposites in physique and temperament, but they complemented one another perfectly.
What won Post over was the revelation that the balloon would be the America II, which had won the USA the International Balloon Cup in 1909. It was considered a “lucky balloon,” and Post couldn’t resist its pull. He agreed to join Hawley after the Boston Air Show, and in the second week of September they were reunited in Indianapolis.
On September 17 the America II and eight other balloons rose into the air hoping to win the right to represent the USA in the International Balloon Cup the following month. The selection procedure was simple: the three balloons that covered the greatest distance before landing would be chosen. One by one the balloons came to earth, first the New York after only 185 miles, then the Pennsylvania II, then Hossler . . . until only the America II remained airborne. Post and Hawley finally landed in Warrenton, Virginia, 450 miles east of Indianapolis, after a flight time of forty-eight hours and twenty-three minutes. It was a new American endurance record for a balloon, and Hawley told reporters they could have gone on longer but came down “for fear of being blown into Chesapeake Bay.” It had been a memorable trip, but, he added, “While we were passing above Noble County, Ohio, on Sunday evening I distinctly heard two bullets whistle past my ears . . . The government should take steps at once to protect balloonists who are likely to be killed at any time by ignorant or vicious countrymen who persist in firing at them as they fly above farms.” That he and Post had not been shot down was pure luck, and for that they thanked the continued good fortune of America II.
In New York there was little interest in the balloon race about to start in St. Louis, nor was there much enthusiasm for Walter Wellman and what the New York Sun called his “mad enterprise.” All eyes were on Belmont Park and the forthcoming International Aviation Meet, even though it was still a week away. The Sunday edition of the New York American carried a photograph of Glenn Curtiss greeting two of the French aviators, Count Jacques de Lesseps and Hubert Latham, as they stepped off the steamship La Lorraine twenty-four hours earlier. Both men had expressed their pleasure to be in New York and their eagerness to begin tuning up their aircraft. The race organizers took the Frenchmen to lunch at the Café Martin, and later, when the six-foot-tall count, who was the tenth child of Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, arrived at his apartment at the St. Regis Hotel, he was asked by a reporter what had impressed him most about New York. “Your Fifth Avenue and the constant stream of pretty women passing along it,” replied the twenty-seven-year-old, with the earnest appreciation of a connoisseur. “I think your American women are the personification of elegance and ‘chic.’ They are admirable.”
Hubert Latham had checked into the the Knickerbocker Hotel (now known as 6 Times Square), an Astor establishment on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, and he was soon sitting at the bar admiring the magnificent twenty-eight-foot-long mural, Old King Cole and His Fiddlers Three, by Maxfield Parrish,* and chatting to the bar steward in flawless English. Born in Paris in 1883 to an English father and a French mother, Latham was a slim, well-dressed man with a pallid complexion, visible evidence of his consumption. A Parisian physician had given him a year to live—eighteen months ago. Latham’s grip on life was still strong, and he intended to keep squeezing until the pips squeaked. He was rarely to be seen without a glass in one hand and his long ivory cigarette holder in the other. The ivory reputedly came from the tusks of an elephant shot by Latham during an expedition to the Sudan in 1905. Big game had been Latham’s first love upon graduating from Oxford University in 1904, but in 1908 he witnessed one of Wilbur Wright’s flights at Le Mans and, like Claude Grahame-White, fell in love with the airplane. He bought shares in Gastembide & Mengin, a struggling company set up by a French mechanical engineer called Leon Levavasseur, who had constructed a lightweight monoplane that had crashed in every trial. Latham cut a deal with Levavasseur: “I will try the machine for you and continue flying with it, no matter how often I smash it. If I am killed, all the better—but you must repair it for me.”
The crashes were frequent in the first few weeks of the partnership, but Latham survived each one, crawling out from under the wreckage with one hand already reaching for his cigarette case. Steadily, Levavasseur ironed out the flaws in his airplane (christened the Antoinette in honor of the wife of Monsieur Gastembide) until, in June 1909, Latham flew fifty miles without a hitch. The following month he’d left France in an attempt to win the $5,000 prize on offer for the first man to fly across the English Channel. Thousands cheered his departure and thousands waited for his arrival, but it was not to be. Six miles off the French coast the airplane’s fifty-horse power engine coughed like a consumptive and died. Latham made a perfect landing on a flat sea, and as the wooden machine bobbed gently up and down, he lit a cigarette and waited for his rescue.
Latham was one of several aviators whose photograph appeared in the New York Sun on Sunday alongside an article that listed the names of the twenty-six fliers slated to appear at the meet. The paper also gave details of the money on offer: “The cash prizes amount to $72,300 [approximately $1,152,500 today]. The aviators will also receive a percentage of the gate receipts. One special prize of $10,000 is offered for a flight from Belmont Park to the Statue of Liberty and back. Another prize of $5,000 will be awarded to the aviator who reaches or exceeds an altitude of 10,000 feet. Other prizes will be given for duration, distance, speed, cross-country flights and passenger carrying.”
But the New York Herald, which was owned by Gordon Bennett,* was keen to point out that the Belmont Park event would be more than just a “Show,” a few days of inconsequential entertainment given over to playboys and stuntmen. Much more was at stake, proclaimed the paper in an article headlined NATIONS BATTLE FOR AIR CHAMPIONSHIP:
“So great is the interest in the secrets that are expected to be revealed that army officers, not only of this government, but of France, England and Germany, will be students of what takes place there. The first practical use of the flying machine being for military purposes, this demonstration of types designed by the greatest constructors in the world will add something like a final word on their relative values.”
The contingent of American army officers planning to attend at Belmont Park wished they could share the Herald’s bullishness, but they had encountered too many shortsighted, penny-pinching bureaucrats of late to hold out much hope for the “final word.”
In February 1910 the New York Times had run an article about the visit to the White House of a delegation of American aviation specialists, including Cortlandt Field Bishop, president of the Aero Club, and Brigadier General James Allen, chief signal officer of the army. Their goal was to persuade President Taft to increase the spending on airplanes and dirigibles, and the paper stood squarely behind them, even going so far as to print the respective aerial strengths of the major powers in the hope of shaming the government into action: “Germany has now in military service 14 dirigibles of six different models and 5 airplanes; France has 7 dirigibles and 29 airplanes; Italy 3 dirigibles and 7 airplanes; Russia 3 dirigibles and 6 airplanes; Austria 2 dirigibles and 4 airplanes; England 2 dirigibles and 2 airplanes . . . the United States has just 1 dirigible and 2 airplanes.”
Taft had lent a sympathetic ear to the delegation but refused to accede to their request. Let’s wait and see how aviation develops in the next year or two was the gist of his demurral. A motivating factor in Taft’s decision was his wish to concentrate the United States’ energy and finances on Latin America and Eastern Asia, what he called his Dollar Diplomacy. The USA was heavily investing in both regions in an attempt to create stability, while at the same time promoting American commercial interests at the expense of European ones, and Taft saw no reason why he should divert money to the purchase of airplanes. That Europe was becoming increasingly unruly—what with Serbia recognizing Austria’s claim to Bosnia, Turkey suppressing unrest in Albania, and an arms race between Britain and Germany—was of little interest to Taft. In his opinion war in Europe would not affect the United States.
Yet a month later American papers reported that the French Senate had agreed to increase their military aviation budget by $145,000, and in June the Baltimore American carried a dispatch from Berlin stating that $3 million was being spent by the German military in preparation for large-scale aerial maneuvers later that year. The correspondent warned, “German military experts are visionaries . . . their imaginations teem with the dreams of the future in the air. They see the heavens crowded with aerial crafts of all sorts . . . [a] complete aerial navy consisting of big battleships with tubes for casting down explosives, swift clippers of the clouds, corresponding to the present high-speed naval cruisers, small torpedo craft and transport vessels.”
The army asked Glenn Curtiss to put on a display during an Atlantic City meet in July. Curtiss was happy to oblige, only too aware of the potential riches that lay in store for his airplane manufacturing company if the government’s head could be pried from the sand. On July 12 Curtiss climbed up onto the small, hard seat of his biplane and took off toward the Atlantic coast in search of the anchored yacht John E. Mehrer II, which, for the purposes of the demonstration, would be an enemy battleship. The oranges heavy in the pockets of Curtiss’s jacket were his bombs. Flying at 45 mph, he approached the yacht at three hundred feet and dropped the first orange. It landed three feet from the officials gathered on the deck. The remaining “bombs” were released with similar accuracy, and later Colo nel William Jones told the Chicago Daily Tribune, “The air machine has proved its efficacy.”
Emboldened by the success of Curtiss’s trial, Major General Leonard Wood, chief of staff of the army, announced that efforts to obtain funds from Congress “at the next session for an equipment of airplanes would be doubled.” Wood let it be known he was demanding nothing short of half a million dollars for what he called an urgent need.
Alarmed at the prospect of a cut in its funding, the U.S. navy launched an offensive against the airplane. Rear Admiral Robley D. Evans wrote a column for the Boston Sunday American in early September in which he ridiculed the idea that the airplane posed a threat to the navy. “A few oranges or confetti bombs have been dropped from a height of a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet [sic],” he wrote, “much to the amusement of the nursery maids and children who saw the experiment . . . Any good baseball player would have caught the oranges, and at the distance from which they were dropped the aviator would have been unseated by the return throw.” Rear Admiral Evans concluded that the experiments were “absolutely futile” and asserted to Americans that, provided they trusted his expertise, “they will not consider the danger to battleships very serious.”
Congress agreed with Evans and turned down Major General Wood’s demand for more funds, but the American army found an unlikely ally in Claude Grahame-White. Before leaving England he had berated the British government for exhibiting similar backwardness, and in America he continued to warn that a frightening new chapter in warfare was about to be opened, and it wouldn’t be confined to Europe. At a dinner given by the National Press Club in Washington in early October, Grahame-White had told his audience of reporters and high-ranking military figures, “Eventually the airplane will be the feature in all wars. Guns and powerful bombs will be carried on them, and the greatest of the modern battleships will be useless.”
On the afternoon of Sunday, October 16, however, Claude Grahame-White had far more pressing matters on his mind than the role of the airplane in future wars; there were women to be entertained, so he spent the afternoon at the Benning racetrack doing just that. The New York Herald described how Grahame-White stopped his motor at fifteen hundred feet “and made one of his sensational sweeping dives in front of the club house lawn, landing lightly on the ground just as Miss Katherine Letterman, social secretary to Mrs. Taft, cried out some words of encouragement.” Leaving Miss Letterman blushing like a besotted schoolgirl, Grahame-White shot back into the air and repeated the stunt to a thunderstorm of wild applause. The correspondent from the Herald was as rapt as everyone else, but nonetheless he couldn’t help but notice that among the onlookers was Pauline Chase, and she appeared to have one eye on the sky and the other on Marie Campbell, the “uncommonly attractive young woman” who had ridden with Grahame-White at Boston. Curiously, Miss Campbell had now turned up in Washington.
* The New York Times had offered $25,000 to the winner of the Chicago to New York airplane race, but the daunting nine-hundred-mile distance deterred everyone.
* Parrish received $5,000 for painting the mural in 1906. In 1935 it was moved to the St. Regis Hotel, and in 2007 it was restored at a cost of $100,000.
* Gordon Bennett was the then sixty-nine-year-old publisher of the New York Herald, the paper founded by his father. Though Gordon served in the navy during the Civil War, he gained a reputation as something of a playboy in later years, and in 1877 a New York socialite ended their engagement after a particularly debauched evening. He spent the rest of his years in Paris and died in 1918.