Monday, October 24, 1910
The official search for Alan Hawley and Augustus Post was launched at daybreak on Monday. The Syracuse Post Standard reported that on the explicit instructions of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Canada’s first French-Canadian prime minister, “the celebrated mountain police will begin ranging over the wild territory north and northwest of the Great Lakes. These men, who starve like martyrs and ride and fight like demons when it is necessary, will go over hundreds of square miles.” The Royal Northwest Mounted Police also intended to interview every hunter, trapper, huntsman, and woodsman they encountered to ascertain if a large yellow balloon had been seen. In addition to the police hunt, the head of the National Transcontinental Railway said he had sent word to the “thousands of men blazing the way for the new line through the wilderness” to be on the lookout for the two balloonists.
The Aero Club of America had dispatched one of its members, Lewis Spindler, who, so it was said, knew the Great Lakes region like the back of his hand. He had left St. Louis on Sunday for Toronto. Upon his arrival he met Colonel Gibson, lieutenant governor of Canada, and listened to what information had so far come in. A hunter, Charles Treadway, said he’d seen a balloon the previous Wednesday, as he’d tracked a moose near the Kippewa River in northern Quebec. He reckoned the balloon was going fast, about forty miles an hour. Damn near startled the moose, it did. A guide, Richard Cole, was canoeing down a river in Ontario on Thursday when he saw a balloon crash into “impenetrable forest.”
A telegram had also recently arrived from Sam Perkins, copilot of the Düsseldorf II, in response to a request for information. “We have no idea of the location of the America II,” he said. “The only balloon we saw was a yellow one over Northern Michigan Tuesday afternoon, going south. If the America went north, the case is hopeless, as we are as far north as the railroad goes, and for the last 500 miles we saw no civilization.”
The most substantial clue was the message dropped from the basket of America II over Thompsonville on Tuesday afternoon. The authorities in Michigan had already made inquiries in the state to discover if anyone had seen the balloon after it passed Thompsonville, and someone had, over the town of St. Ignace on the Upper Peninsula. It was headed northeast, on a course, as was explained to Spindler, “which would carry it east of Lake Superior, past Sault Ste. Marie and into the wilderness north of the Canadian Pacific Railroad.” It was agreed that Spindler would depart in the evening for Chapleau, a remote Ontarian settlement 350 miles northwest of Toronto, from where the search would be coordinated.
The commencement of the search sent a frisson down the spines of American newspapers. LOST AERONAUTS, LIVING OR DEAD? was the headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune on Monday morning, which then answered the question in the first paragraph, saying they were “more probably dead from exposure or by accident.” That is, if the bears and wolves hadn’t polished them off first. But the Tribune ended with a flight of fancy: “It is within the range of possibilities that the America II has succeeded in traveling an even greater distance than was covered by the Düsseldorf II and that its crew, after enduring as great, or even greater hardships, has reached in safety some trapper’s cabin too remote to permit of communication with the outside world within a week or more.”
Hawley and Post awoke on Monday cold, hungry, and depressed. The contentment of the previous evening, like the broth, was gone. They had little left to eat now, just a box of biscuits, a few of their meat lozenges, and a tin of soup. The contents of their ballast bags they used as haver-sacks had been reduced to simple necessities, yet they seemed as heavy as ever. Four hard days had already started to emaciate Hawley’s once flabby physique, and his gray tweed suit, darkened with grime, flapped about his belly. Post’s brown velvet corduroy outfit had been shredded during the fight with the undergrowth, and his feet were blistered from his hobnailed boots, which had started to come apart. His goatee had grown wild across his face and itched with a week’s worth of dirt. They set off along the shore at seven A.M., the water to their right and the sky above blue and black like a deep bruise. The ground was flat for the first mile, and Hawley’s knee bore up well as they walked along the beach. Post fell back a little so his companion could lead for the first time. Suddenly Hawley stopped dead in his tracks and “gave an exclamation of surprise.” Post quickened his step and looked to where his companion was pointing. A few yards in front was a shovel leaning against a chopped log. Hawley looked about him and spotted something through the trees on their left. “There’s a tent!” he yelled.
A narrow path just wide enough for one man led through the trees to a clearing where the small white tent had been pitched. An ax was lying in the grass, near a homemade paddle, and a couple of pails containing pieces of muskrat and rabbit. Post could also see a short stick with a fishhook and several traps, but there was no sign of recent life, no footprints in the dew or lingering whiff of breakfast. They unfastened the tent and ducked inside. Good God, they couldn’t believe their eyes. In the center of the tent was a sheet-iron stove with a brown teapot underneath, and hanging from the ridgepole was a pair of round snowshoes. Two large pails were to one side. Hawley peered inside and told Post one contained lard and the other flour. What’s that under the blanket? asked Post. Hawley lifted the blanket. It was a sack of flour. There was a box of homespun clothing, a half-burned wax candle, a can of black powder, a bag of shot. Hawley uncorked a bottle of something syrupy and black and sniffed. Ugh! Post laughed and said it was probably all-purpose medicine for “what ails you.”
Post clicked his tongue in satisfaction when he saw a full box of matches, then gave an admiring whistle as he held up a knife with a curved blade and curiously made handle, which, he told Hawley, “was to be used as a wedge in getting bark off a birch tree to make a canoe.” In the far corner of the tent was a pot of cooked beans, a can of brown sugar, and a bar of soap.
Post went outside to collect a few pieces of wood for the stove and returned with a relieved look. It had started to snow. They put up the stovepipe, built a fire, and “as the flames crackled, we unrolled our blankets on the dry balsam floor and relaxed into a delightful state of mind.” “Post,” said Hawley, “if anyone asks me what heaven is like, I shall say it’s a trapper’s tent after four days of terrible travel.”
Post rested for an hour and then, leaving his friend asleep, crawled out of the five-foot-high tent and set about exploring their surrounds. With the snow still falling, he thought it prudent to husband some firewood for their stove. Once he’d chopped some logs and stashed them in the tent, Post began to walk along the trail that led from the shore toward the higher ground. “I had not gone far when I saw a cache on a big birch tree off to one side of the trail,” he wrote in his logbook. The cache was a big roll of birch bark, and inside were various articles of clothing, a tin pail, and a bag of salt. Attached to the cache was a note in French: No admission without business. Gone down to hunt and trap in lake Suniore. Hawley took a pencil from his jacket and added, Oct. 24, 1910. Alan R. Hawley and Augustus Post in the Balloon “America II” landed 15 miles northeast from here, Oct. 19, 1910. Left Mo. Oct. 17, 1910.
Post pressed on up the trail in the hope that when he reached the top of the ridge he would see further signs of habitation, or possibly find a canoe. But he saw nothing and after several minutes of fruitless halloing he returned the way he had come “as the snow was getting thick.” Hawley was awake and Post described his brief exploration. Hawley told Post he had been doing some thinking. He intended to stay at the campsite “to wait for the trapper, if it took all winter.”
Post didn’t argue, now wasn’t the time, but he knew better than his companion that unless the trapper returned before the spring, this tent would be their tomb. The snow had arrived and would remain for the next four or five months; not even the most skilled Canadian woodsman could survive such a climate, particularly if he was wearing a city suit.
Post concealed his anxiety from Hawley and instead cooked up a banquet of biscuits and hot soup. Then Post repaired his boot with a length of cord he had found in the tent and “with a smart fire burning in the stove, we rested, reviewing our hardships, speculating as to the return of the trapper, and canvassing our ability to cook the flour into cakes and biscuits.”
Later in the day Post exchanged a few strong words with his partner when “Hawley thought I was stingy with the firewood, but it took strength to split it, and I had been taught prudence.” Hawley also pestered for more food, confident that they were now out of danger, but Post advised caution. They replenished the stove with wood, finished off the box of biscuits, and settled down for the night, as outside the snow continued to fall.
Allan Ryan arrived at Belmont Park early on Monday morning in need of a change in fortune. Sunday had not been a good day for the general manager of the aviation tournament. No flying, a restless crowd, accusations of endangering aviators’ lives, an official protest about the safety of the course from Alfred Le Blanc, and a threatening letter from a Mr. William Ellison. To cap it all off, his wife—or rather, the family chauffeur—had been caught speeding on the way home from Sunday’s event. At this very moment his wife was waiting to appear at a Queens courthouse.
As if Ryan needed reminding of his trying Sunday, it was all there in the morning papers waiting for him on his desk. Even his wife’s indiscretion. He picked up the New York Herald with its disturbing front-page headline: FRENCH AVIATORS IN REVOLT, DEMAND NEW COURSE FOR TROPHY RACE. The New York American carried an interview with the troublesome Monsieur Le Blanc in which he was quoted as saying, “The international course as it has been laid out by the Aero Club of America is a death trap. It goes over tall trees, stables, telegraph wires, and railroad tracks with scarcely a patch three hundred yards wide at any place where an airplane may land.”
Le Blanc had outlined his dissatisfaction in a wire to the Aero Club of France and was awaiting their response, but if they advised him to withdraw from the tournament, then he would not hesitate to do so. So would Hubert Latham, said the Herald, who had been asked by a reporter on Sunday what he thought of the course. “If I were to tell the truth about the track, it would be ‘suicidal,’ ” he had replied, adding, “and after that I probably would have to leave America.”
Unfortunately for Ryan, sipping his coffee as he flicked through the papers, the French aviators weren’t alone in disliking the course. Armstrong Drexel had been quoted in the New York Sun saying that the course was “doubly dangerous,” not just because of the obstacles listed by Le Blanc, but also because of the high winds. “Most emphatically do I say,” concluded Drexel, “that the international course is to be protested.”
What worried Charles Hamilton, according to an interview in the New York Sun, was that final corner before the home stretch. He didn’t use the expression dead man’s turn, but in the presence of the paper’s correspondent the American had jabbed his cane in the direction of the red-and-white pylon and warned that if Le Blanc or any flier in a hundred-horse power machine “tried to make that turn at the acute angle marked by the pylons the fore and aft ends of his airplane would come together like a jackknife while the engine broke through the center.” The Sun asked Hamilton how, if the organizers refused to alter the course before Saturday’s big race, one might successfully negotiate the corner. Well, that’s just the problem, replied Hamilton: “To get around that turn at great speed, a man would have to fly so wide that he would have covered eighty miles before he could be credited with flying the sixty miles prescribed. But if you make a wide turn, you have to fly over the grandstand, and if you fly over the grandstand, you will be penalized, and there you are.”
Hamilton, though, had no intention of withdrawing from the race, and neither did John Moisant, whose name brought a smile to Allan’s face. Good old John, he could always be relied on to offer his support. Asked to comment on the circuit by the New York Herald, Moisant had replied that he found the criticism a bit puzzling; after all, “at Rheims [in the 1909 International Aviation Cup] Mr. Curtiss had to fly over houses and trees when he won the cup. There isn’t a course in the world of five kilometers that is entirely free of obstructions of some sort. I certainly shall fly over the course.”
Claude Grahame-White and the two other British fliers, Alec Ogilvie and James Radley, were reported to have no gripes about the course, and neither did the Wright or Curtiss teams. We’ll have a race, Allan said to himself, aware that he was chairing a meeting of the committee later in the morning to discuss the French protest. Then he turned to the next problem—William Ellison, spokesman for the homeowners in the vicinity of the Belmont Park course.
The New York Sun carried a front-page report about the letter that Ellison had sent on Sunday to every aviator in which he expressed the anger felt by many local residents whose homes were under the flight path of the international course. What vexed them so was the erection of the giant canvas screens along the fence at the west end of the course. Not only were they an eyesore, they also blocked the residents’ view of the flying. If the screens were not removed, the paper reported, then “aviators who fly above certain adjacent properties will be winged with bullets.”
Ryan had already given his initial reaction to the letter—“childish”—but he couldn’t risk a few hotheaded cranks taking potshots at his aviators, so the screens, or at least some of them, would have to be dismantled. First, however, he had to attend to another pressing problem. Ryan called the head of the Pinkerton security team to his office. Have you seen the morning papers? he asked. No, he hadn’t. Ryan told him they were full of accounts of the heavy-handedness of his men; worse than that, it wasn’t the spectators complaining, it was the aviators. Ryan picked up a copy of the New York American and read a paragraph describing how John Moisant— the John Moisant—“was obliged to pay his own way into the meet on Sunday because he had forgotten his arm brassard.” Then Ryan’s old friend Monsieur Le Blanc was livid because his ballooning partner and translator, Walther de Mumm, hadn’t been granted access to the hangar area. The less we antagonize Le Blanc, the better, Ryan suggested. Then, pointing to the World, Ryan read the report about Claude Grahame-White being turned away from the entrance because he hadn’t his pass. How can your men not recognize the most famous aviator in the world—particularly when he had Pauline Chase on his arm? It had taken a few choice words from Grahame-White, the World said—“that sounded like the roaring of the lion”—to convince the Pinkerton guards it would be wise to step aside.
And then, said Ryan, the crowning indignity, the most astonishing blunder . . . Wilbur Wright barred from entering. Wilbur Wright . . . the man who invented the airplane. If not for him, none of us would be here! Ryan dismissed the Pinkerton chief with a demand that his men show a little bit of discretion, not to mention common sense.
Ryan then walked out of the clubhouse to organize the removal of the canvas screens. He looked up at the blue sky, then across toward the hangars and the flags curled sleepily round their poles. No wind. Perhaps his fortunes were about to turn.
The noon trains that departed Pennsylvania Station on Monday were filled to standing room, and the onboard vendors selling aviation magazines had to force their way through the carriages. Some of the passengers squashed in the center of the carriages swung themselves up to the racks and looked through the ventilators as they neared the grounds in the hope of being first to spot a flying machine.
Streetcars bound for Belmont Park “looked like Broadway cars at rush hour,” and by one P.M. not a parking space was to be had. Every one of the ten thousand spectators who clicked through the turnstiles glanced across at the scoreboard and smiled when they saw the flag was white, indicating “flight probable.” Pinned to the bulletin board was a statement just released by the Belmont Park committee, their response to the official French protest of the previous day. The statement concluded by saying that “Mr. [Cortlandt] Bishop again went over the course and made other suggestions as to improvements. This work will be done tomorrow in order that the course may be ready . . . The small trees and signposts are to be removed and it is suggested that one of the pylons be placed more to the north in order to avoid one or two houses and sheds which are in the way. It is not expected nor is it possible to provide a billiard table for the entire five kilometer course, but every effort will be made to render the course as safe as possible.”
It appeared, too, that the Pinkerton security men had heeded Ryan’s censure, and smiles had replaced snarls on the faces of gray-uniformed guards who patrolled the grounds. They were even allowing friends and family members of the fliers to visit the hangars, provided they were vouched for by an aviator. One of the first to flitter over was the delectable Grace McKenzie, the Canadian girl for whom Jacques de Lesseps had fallen. A “clubhouse rumor” was that an engagement was imminent. Tongues were also wagging about Claude Grahame-White, with a battalion of binoculars in the grandstand trained on hangar No. 14 as the Englishman laughed and joked with Eleonora Sears, who after Sunday’s “severely plain costume” was now wearing what the New York Sun’s style guru described as “a navy blue suit with the skirt at least six inches from the ground.” More than one newspaper found it curious that Pauline Chase was nowhere to be seen.
Armstrong Drexel spent a long time chatting with his brother and sister-in-law and generally, as was his nature, “being courteous to all visitors and [he] even allowed his flying toggery to be inspected.” He showed off his helmet to one reporter, explaining that experience had taught him it was invaluable when trying for an altitude prize. Drexel was one of the few aviators to wear a helmet, and his was “leather with several inches of padding . . . The flaps over the ears are perforated so that he can tell how his engine is working.”
As the spectators shopped, lunched, and gossiped, waiting for the program to start at one thirty P.M., great interest was shown in the “moving picture people” who were at Belmont Park for the first time since the meet’s inception, and not everyone approved of their presence.
Since September the New York World had been at the forefront of a campaign to clean up the moving-picture industry, citing as its reason a spate of juvenile crimes that had allegedly been inspired by films. A thirteen-year-old adolescent arrested for robbery had told police that he acquired the methods at a moving-picture show, while another boy had “conceived the idea of becoming a criminal and learned to go about it from a scene in a picture show.” The magistrate who convicted him of theft called the picture houses “sinks of iniquity” and demanded they clean up their act before it was too late.
Carl Laemmle, president of the Independent Moving Picture Company, had responded swiftly to the demand, issuing a circular warning scriptwriters that he would refuse to consider any scripts “which are built around murders or suicide or crimes of any kind . . . His company is trying to put the moving picture business on a higher plane and what it wants is preferably good, clean, light comedy.”
Aviation offered picture houses the chance to redeem themselves by showing wholesome entertainment, and one of the most popular films of the early autumn had been footage from the 1909 International Aviation Cup race in France. Now the camera operators were at Belmont Park to record the action from America’s biggest-ever aviation tournament. They began by setting up outside the Wright hangar and using an entire roll of film to capture Wilbur inspecting his airplane. His brother, Orville, had arrived from Dayton late on Sunday evening, but he was busy inside the hangar making final adjustments to their new machine. Next the cameraman tried to get some footage of the crowd moving around the course. This caused a few difficulties, much to the amusement of the New York Sun’s correspondent. What was so funny, he wrote, “was that many seemed to think that they had to walk as fast as they had seen figures move on the screen to get the right effect.”
The moving-picture people couldn’t have chosen a better day to visit Belmont Park. It was, in the opinion of the New York Herald, the greatest flying exhibition the world had ever known. It started with Arch Hoxsey and Ralph Johnstone performing a selection of their aerial stunts for the masses, including Johnstone’s heart-stopping loop-the-loop one thousand feet from the ground, during which, as he momentarily hung upside down, he could hear “the struts straining and . . . the singing of the winds through the wires shrilling higher in key.” Then came the extraordinary sight of “ten airplanes in simultaneous flight” competing in the day’s first discipline, the Hourly Distance contests. Up went the Frenchman Emile Aubrun, then Hubert Latham in his Antoinette monoplane; Armstrong Drexel slipped on his flying helmet, shook hands with his brother, and shot off in his Blériot. The debonair Englishman Grahame-White, reported the World, “with a bow and a smile, cut off an animated conversation with Miss Eleonora Sears, that dashing young sportswoman, and took to the air in his Farman biplane.” Then out of the hangar came the machines of Jacques de Lesseps; Eugene Ely and John McCurdy of the Curtiss team; and finally Walter Brookins, not in the Wright racer, but in another new model that had been brought to New York from Dayton by Orville Wright. No flier remained aloft for the full hour but Drexel circled the two-and-a-half-kilometer course twenty-seven times in fifty-four minutes, Aubrun twenty-six times, Johnstone twenty-one, and Hoxsey and Grahame-White finished even on eighteen laps.
That was the end of the day’s flying for Grahame-White, who returned his borrowed machine to Clifford Harmon. Grahame-White had no interest in the next event, the hourly altitude contest; that wasn’t his forte. The Farman biplane* wasn’t the right airplane in which to go climbing to the heavens, and anyway Grahame-White preferred distance to height. He alone had already qualified for Thursday’s Statue of Liberty race, and with the International Aviation Cup two days later, he was loath to run any further risks similar to the one he had taken on Sunday. John Moisant, meanwhile, was grounded after the wreck of his machines, and his hopes were pinned on the Lovelace-Thompson Company, which had taken charge of his Blériot with a promise to have it repaired by Wednesday.
Walter Brookins took off and made a couple of slow laps, increasing his height as he began to deviate from the course. He was flying a Baby Wright, a machine similar in design and dimensions to the Baby Grand—the plane introduced to the press by Wilbur Wright on Saturday—although the Baby Wright had inferior power.
The spectators in the grandstand began moving down to the front lawns to get a better view as Brookins started to climb. They craned their necks, the men clamping a hand on their straw boaters and looking over their starched collars, the women using their programs to shield the sun from their eyes as he rose higher, leaving behind Emile Aubrun and James Radley, one of the British fliers, who had started out on the second Hourly Distance competition. That event had suddenly become humdrum, compared to the sight of Walter Brookins’s small Wright biplane disappearing into the sky. Then someone gave a shout and pointed to the southeast. Look, over there, isn’t that another machine? For several minutes the identity of the mysterious biplane was unknown. Press and public searched the hangars with their field glasses to see who was missing. “It was Count de Lesseps,” wrote the correspondent from the New York Sun, “who to get room to circle wide in and also to give Brookins some air acres of his own for maneuvering had gone off toward Meadow Brook and Hempstead to take his running jump at the sky.”
Higher and higher the two aircraft climbed, sometimes vanishing momentarily behind the few cotton clouds in the warm blue sky, watched all the while by ten thousand astonished people, but not by Viola Justin, the society correspondent for New York’s Evening Mail. This was her first visit to the aviation show, though she had watched many a horse race at Belmont Park, and as she observed the wealthy onlookers standing on the tips of their patent leather shoes, a thought struck her. How best to describe it? She mused in print, “The Four Hundred had at last discovered a new sensation and a new expression . . . a human thrilled look of intense, absorbing interest . . . faces that have become so hardened from years of immobility that they look like plaster casts relaxed and wrinkled.” While New York’s high society scanned the sky, Justin stood on the lawn scanning them with their “straining lines of necks and double chins . . . faces so foreshortened and out of perspective that only the tips of teeth were visible to those directly under the boxes.” It was, she told her readers, “a strange new angle of society.” The “airplane stare” had been born. But even Miss Justin lifted her mordant eyes when the hordes began to puff and blow and point to the heavens. Brookins and de Lesseps, their aircraft resembling what the Sun called “elongated postage stamps,” appeared to be heading directly toward each other thousands of feet above the ground. Men gave a strangled cry and women’s hands went to their mouths as it seemed the inevitable was sure to occur. The correspondent from the World wasn’t fooled, however; he knew that “the crowd watched fascinated and motionless for the meeting which might—which might, you know—mean a collision. And then the two specks merged until the specks were patterned one upon the other and had become just one speck. They separated in a moment and for minutes afterwards the discussions about the ‘collision’ took eyes off the specks which necessitated a refocusing of the eyes.”
Now the planes were circling each other with de Lesseps’s machine above the square biplane of Brookins. How close do you think they are to one another? children asked their fathers with a mix of fear and excitement. The airplanes dived and rose and drifted for what seemed like hours to the crowd. Necks began to stiffen and heads began to throb as spectators concentrated on the drama high above their heads.
Over at hangar row Orville Wright was standing with his brother and their sister, Katharine, watching the show. “Well, Brooky seems to have caught him,” said Orville to Wilbur, fully aware that the two machines were hundreds of feet apart. Nearby the correspondent from the New York Herald laughed at a rare Orville quip, then resumed his stare. Brookins suddenly broke off and began to dive. The onlookers applauded the aviator’s audacity, but the Wrights knew at once that something had gone wrong. The New York Herald reporter saw that “the softly moving lips of Wilbur Wright were framing a silent prayer for the boy who was taking such desperate chances.”
Walter Brookins’s engine had cut out without a warning, and now he sat at the controls—without a seat belt—gliding back down to earth in wide spirals. At two thousand feet he knew the wind wasn’t going to take him close to Belmont Park, so he singled out some fields two miles to the north as the best chance for a safe landing.
Brookins had previously suffered engine failure thousands of feet up in the air. During an air show in Indianapolis the previous June, he had reached forty-two hundred feet when he heard a tearing noise from the engine behind him and the motor died. Unable to turn around to investigate the cause of the sound, Brookins started to drop out of the sky. At least he had broken the world’s altitude record, he told reporters later, “and if my luck held, I’d break the gliding record, too. If it didn’t, I’d probably break my neck.”
He had landed without trouble on that occasion, and now as he glimpsed Belmont Park away to his left, the twenty-two-year-old calmly slid out of the sky. Passengers waiting for a train at the station one stop before Belmont Park jumped down onto the line and tracked the machine’s descent. The Wright brothers commandeered an automobile and told the driver to “follow that airplane.”
They found Brookins in a field. The biplane had its nose in the mud, like a pig with its snout in a trough, but the aviator was unharmed. Dressed in a two-piece, green tweed suit and brown boots, he might have passed for one of the bystanders who had reached the downed machine from the railroad station, were it not for the patina of black grease on his young face.
Upon landing, Count de Lesseps unfastened the small aneroid barometer from his wrist and handed it to an officer from the Signal Corps. Its reading of 5,615 feet was impressive, provided it was corroborated by the official barograph now being removed from the Frenchman’s plane. A corpsman passed both instruments to an official, who handed them to the judges’ box. The glass lid on the barograph was lifted and a strip of paper peeled from the cylinder on which was a frenetic scribble of red lines, each one indicating approximately 165 feet in height. It took the official several minutes to count and recount the lines, but at the end he was satisfied that Count de Lesseps had climbed to 5,615 feet.
Brookins reappeared with the Wrights a little later, and his barograph indicated that he’d reached 4,882 feet, way inferior to his personal best of 6,175 feet, established at Atlantic City three months earlier.
At four o’clock Peter Prunty roared through his megaphone that it was time for the second hourly altitude contest, but only Armstrong Drexel signaled his desire to try to outdo de Lesseps. Having watched the earlier aerial duel as he lunched from a picnic hamper on the grass in front of his hangar, Drexel now fancied going up in the air. Dressed in black oilskins, and with his queer-looking helmet, he rose at a rapid rate until once more the spectators’ heads and necks began to feel the strain. Then the black dot to the northeast became slowly bigger as he descended. He had none of the problems that had afflicted Brookins; it appeared to the press and the public that Drexel had climbed and dropped in thirty-two effortless minutes. His brother outsprinted the French mechanics in a race across the grass to congratulate Drexel on what Peter Prunty told the crowd (subject to official confirmation) was an altitude of 7,105 feet, a height only ever bettered by two men.* Anthony Drexel reached the machine, expecting his brother to jump into his arms in triumph, but Armstrong remained in his seat, literally frozen to it. Eventually, said the World, Drexel was assisted down by his brother and mechanics, and he “plodded unsteadily over the field to his hangar. His face was marked with oil that had flowed from his motor. His teeth were chattering.” Someone suggested a swig of brandy, but Armstrong shook his head, saying he wanted only water. He gulped down two large goblets while a lady’s fur coat was wrapped around his shoulders and reporters gathered around for a quote from the normally garrulous aviator. Confirmation came through the megaphone that Armstrong Drexel had indeed reached a height of 7,105 feet.
Prunty built to a crescendo as he screamed into his megaphone. Or put it another way, folks, that’s “more than a mile and a third up in the air.” To think, aviation fans told each other, that this time last year the altitude record had been a puny 508 feet.
The house saluted a new American altitude record, but the millionaire flier’s arms were too stiff to acknowledge the applause. How cold was it up there? he was asked. “It was beastly cold,” he replied. “Hell was high.”
One more event was scheduled for Monday—the grand speed contest. But after the drama of the altitude competitions, the organizers thought it best to first lay on a comic interlude for the crowd, the equivalent of the aviation clown entering the big top in his spluttering automobile to hoots of laughter. Roland Garros and his mechanics wheeled his Demoiselle from its hangar and the Frenchman jumped up onto what the correspondent from the New York Sun likened to a good-size umbrella. The propeller was engaged, and a ripple of giggles swept the grandstand as the engine started up with a pfut, pfut. He’s not really going to go up in that, is he? people asked one another as Garros began to hop across the grass. “When she first leaves the ground one is minded of a rubber ball,” wrote the Sun. “She bounces back to brush the grass blades for just a moment and then she is off for good.” But once up in the air Garros picked up speed, and he was soon zipping around the course, taking the corners with far more ease than the big biplanes, then ripping along the homestretch at a pace that startled the spectators. He returned to earth after a few minutes, his machine wreathed in its exhaust fumes. “No policeman in Central Park would stand for the way a Demoiselle smokes for a minute,” wrote the Sun, as Garros touched down with a bump and a bounce, waving to the crowd, who stood and cheered and roared with laughter.
For the final event of the day, the crowd pushed and shoved for the best view of the three machines that were being shouldered one by one across the wide infield from the hangars to the sandy racetrack in front of the grandstand. Peter Prunty announced the names of the three entrants in a speed race open only for biplanes: John McCurdy and James Mars in their Curtiss machines, and the little-known American John Frisbie in an invention of his own. Then Prunty explained the rules of the contest: the race would be over ten laps of the two-and-a-half-kilometer inner course, but each airplane was obliged to cover the twenty-five kilometers in under forty minutes or their time would be annulled. The three machines would take off one after another, from a standing position at the starting post used in horse races. At a shot from the timekeeper’s pistol the engine would be engaged while mechanics held the machine in place; a second shot fired from the timekeeper’s pistol sixty seconds later would be the signal for the plane to start moving. The second machine would start to run its engine only when the first was safely in the air, and likewise the third craft.
Hundreds of spectators pressed against the white rail in front of the grandstand as John McCurdy’s aircraft was placed on the sandy track, its nose just nudging the white canvas strip that was the starting line. McCurdy settled back into the seat and bent down to hear a final set of instructions from Glenn Curtiss as the first pistol shot rang out. A mechanic spun the propeller but the engine didn’t catch. There was a groan from the crowd. Someone yelled out words of encouragement. The mechanic tried again, and this time the engine started. McCurdy shouted something to Curtiss, who fumbled around in the pockets of his jacket and handed the flier his goggles. The timekeeper was staring intently at his watch, shouting down the seconds as the machine coughed out black smoke. The mechanics began to edge themselves into positions from where they could safely let go of the machine. Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . bang! The reporter from the New York Sun was up out of his seat as McCurdy pushed down the throttle and the “plane was dancing right down the middle of the track as clean away as a thoroughbred and then up, to a path it liked better.” Frisbie was up next, and then Mars, who rose into the air just as McCurdy negotiated dead man’s turn for the first time and tore down the home straight. The timekeeper told Peter Prunty the time for McCurdy’s opening lap—two minutes and 141.5 seconds. The crowd roared its approval, and they did so with even more gusto when the same aviator dipped under two minutes on his second lap.
Frisbie wasn’t as quick but he seemed to be picking up speed as he scooted down the back straight toward the western end of the field, then past the high fence along which the contentious canvas screens had been erected. A few of them had been dismantled earlier in the day on the orders of Allan Ryan, but not all. As Frisbie passed the fence, a gust of wind rushed through “and sent the airplane crashing to the grass on its beam ends, smashing a wing and rolling Frisbie along the sod for yards.” The aviator staggered to his feet mouthing obscenities at the fence and kicking great lumps out of the grass. “He’s up!” Prunty cheerfully informed the crowd, whose eyes reverted to the two remaining contestants, both of whom took note of Frisbie’s fate and increased their height.
The crowd reluctantly began to take their leave of Belmont Park once McCurdy had beaten Mars to win the speed race. Ten laps, twenty-five kilometers, in nineteen minutes—the feat sent the ten thousand spectators home in high spirits. One of them, Mrs. Florence Langworthy Richmond, wrote next day to a friend in Warren, Pennsylvania, describing her emotions at what she’d witnessed: “Aviation is so contrary to all our hitherto conceived ideas of the boundaries of man’s power and endeavors. I understand the sensations of the Indians when they first saw steamboats . . . I cannot begin to tell you of the fascination which these new air creatures have for us poor earth-bound things . . . I felt that we were looking upon the dawn of a new era of which I could not live to see the full light. The airplanes were apparently perfectly guided and controlled; they rose, they dipped, they held a straight course, they turned with no visible effort. They stand for much done, but they are only pioneer craft after all.”
Those durable enthusiasts who dallied over their picnic hampers under a saffron sky had the unexpected pleasure of seeing Charles Hamilton try out his formidable Hamilton racer, with its 110-horse power engine. To the reporter from the Evening Sun still filing his copy in the press stand, the airplane “roared around the course twice like an eighteen hour train to Chicago hitting a wagonload of loose rails at 2 o’clock in the morning.” Pleased with her? he asked Hamilton later. Not too bad, replied the flier, “but I didn’t dare let her out.” That would happen only on the day of the International Aviation Cup race.
As Hamilton limped toward his automobile, he passed one of the Wrights’ hangars, its canvas walls illuminated by the lanterns that were still burning inside. All the other aviators had retired for the night; Claude Grahame-White was in the front row of the audience watching Pauline Chase in Our Miss Gibbs, John Moisant was dining with his brother, Alfred, in the Hotel Astor, and in the private banquet room of the Knickerbocker Hotel, Hubert Latham, Alfred Le Blanc, and two balloonists, Jacques Faure and Walther de Mumm, were enjoying the hospitality of James Regan, the hotel’s proprietor, at an extravagant party to celebrate his establishment’s fourth birthday. But Orville and Wilbur planned to burn the midnight oil this evening, tuning up their Baby Grand racer. On Tuesday, Orville intended to stun Belmont Park, and the world, with the first public demonstration of his new machine.
* The Farman had been loaned to Grahame-White by his friend Clifford Harmon, as his own airplane of that make had been damaged on Sunday and he was still waiting to take delivery of a Blériot with which he planned to compete in the International Aviation Cup.
* The world’s record was 9,186 feet, attained by Holland’s Henry Wynmalen on October 1, 1910.