We’re Sending Sputniks to the Moon
There was indeed a “hearty welcome” for all those who came to Eastchurch, in southeast England, in July 1911 to compete for the International Aviation Cup. But Claude Grahame-White wasn’t there to greet them, and nor were most of the aviators who had thrilled the fans at Belmont Park the previous year. Cortlandt Bishop was present and threw a Stars and Stripes around the shoulders of Charles Weymann when he won the cup back for the United States. In second place was Alfred Le Blanc, beaten again, this time by influenza, or at least that was his excuse.
On November 1, 1910, the morning after the acrimonious dinner at the Plaza Hotel, the New York Herald used its editorial to reflect on the Belmont Park tournament. Of course, it said, “It is to be regretted that a misunderstanding arose just at the close but that such things were to be expected when men are engaged in eager competition.” Of greater pertinence was the significance of the meet, and the Herald concluded, “Whatever may be the merits of the controversy, it cannot change the fact that the international aviation tournament this year was the greatest ever held and nothing can detract from the wonderful results or from the powerful stimulus it will give to the development of the art that is to play such a wonderful part in the world’s future.” The next day, November 2, the New York Evening Sun reported that as a result of the recent aviation tournaments in Europe and the United States, the German War Office had ordered airplanes of five different types, including the Wright biplanes, and “elaborate tests are to be made of these machines and then it is said that the Government will make extensive purchases for the army.”
In addition, Britain and France were equipping themselves with flying machines, so it was therefore with no little relief, continued the Evening Sun, that General James Allen, fresh from Belmont Park, “recommends the purchase of at least twenty airplanes to be used in regular practice at different parts of the country during the year.” These would complement the current American aerial strength of one dirigible and two aircraft.
Less than a fortnight later, General Allen was one of the guests on board the cruiser Birmingham, anchored five miles off the Virginian coast, as Eugene Ely took off from the deck and successfully completed the first ship-to-shore flight. In doing so, proclaimed the Chicago Daily Tribune, Ely “proved that the airplane will be a great factor in naval warfare of the future.”
Before the year was out, the first successful message had been sent from an airplane to a wireless station midflight, and Phil Parmalee had demonstrated the commercial capabilities of the airplane by transporting a consignment of silk from Dayton, Ohio, to a dry-goods firm in Columbus, only sixty-five miles but the first air-freight flight. Also the United States Aeronautical Reserve, established on September 10, 1910, had expanded at a prodigious rate, boasting among its members not just military men but “financiers, sportsmen and hundreds of others interested in aeronautics, from President Taft down to the humblest airplane mechanic.”
In an end-of-year article for Fly magazine, Glenn Curtiss described 1910 as “a year of triumphant progress,” and Louis Blériot enthused that “the airplane as it exists today really stands upon the threshold of the most amazing, sporting and commercial possibilities . . . There is absolutely nothing to prevent flight becoming one of the greatest developments in the world’s history.”
Fly’s rival publication, Aero, joined in the applause in its editorial of December 31, 1910: “Perhaps when years pass and the airplane is accepted universally upon its superior merits, when it is admittedly the King of Transit; when the sight of the flying machine is no rarer than that of its gasoline motored cousin on the ground; then, let us hope, some altruistic pioneers will look backwards, remember 1910, and erect a giant pylon of marble in the memory of the year when aviation came into its own. Good old 1910!”
The Wright exhibition team traveled to Denver in mid-November 1910 to put on a show. Flying at five thousand feet above sea level was a new experience for Ralph Johnstone and Arch Hoxsey, but they dazzled the huge crowds with stunts over the foothills of the Rockies. Walter Brookins joined in, too, in his first public appearance since his Belmont Park smash. The morning demonstration on November 17 had been rapturously received, and in the afternoon the trio were up again, Brookins and Hoxsey performing a series of death-defying stunts close to the ground while Johnstone climbed to one thousand feet to demonstrate one of his legendary spiral glides. “He swooped down in a narrow circle,” wrote a reporter from the Chicago Daily Tribune, “the airplane seeming to turn almost in its own length. As he started the second circle, the middle spur which braced the left side of the lower plane, gave way and the wing tips of both upper and lower planes folded up as if they had been hinged.”
Shrieks came from the stands as the biplane started to hurtle toward the ground. Johnstone was pitched forward out of his seat, but his body caught on the wires between the planes. His cap flew off and fell from the sky. One of the aviator’s flailing arms grasped a wooden brace, and as his legs dangled nine hundred feet above the Denver earth, with extraordinary strength and dexterity he pulled himself up so he was standing between the two planes. The crowd wasn’t sure if it was Johnstone’s latest trick, but the reporter from the Tribune had attended enough aviation meets to know this was no stunt. He looked up as Johnstone tried to manipulate the two planes with his hands and feet. For a second the reporter thought he’d succeeded—perhaps so did Johnstone—“but the hope was momentary, however, for when about 800 feet from the ground the machine turned completely over and the spectators fled wildly for safety as the broken airplane, with the aviator still fighting grimly in its mesh of wires and stays, plunged among them with a crash.”*
Johnstone lay under his engine, which was enveloped by the white canvas wings, a shroud for the dead aviator. The hordes that had been fleeing paused, turned, then ran toward the wreck. “Frantic for souvenirs,” wrote the Tribune’s correspondent, “the spoilers quarreled and pulled and tugged among themselves even for the possession of the gloves that had protected Johnstone’s hands. These had been torn from his hands by the first of the mob, but even more heartless was the action of one man, who, cheated of any other booty, tore a splinter of the machine from Johnstone’s body and ran from the scene, bearing his trophy with the aviator’s blood still dripping from its ends.”
Brookins and Hoxsey had seen the whole incident, every terrifying, desperate second. Hoxsey was led away from the broken body of his friend, murmuring the same words over and over: “Poor Ralph, poor Ralph.”†
In the days following the Belmont Park Meet, John Moisant became the idol of America. The tournament had enriched him to the tune of $13,550 (although the $10,000 for the Statue of Liberty race had been held back while Grahame-White’s appeal was taken to the International Aviation Federation), and not a day passed without his appearance in a newspaper or magazine. His life story was told in comic strips, and he became a favorite subject for feature writers. Kate Carew salivated over him in a piece for the New York American on November 6: “His head is round and shapely. His face tapers from the cheekbones to a square chin, chiseled as if by a sculptor. His mouth is large, full-lipped and very widely arched—a bold, Roman mouth to match the dark, imperturbable eyes. You’d look at him twice, dears, I know you would.” In short, who needed Claude Grahame-White?
Moisant capitalized on his fame by forming the Moisant International Aviators, combining his flying skills with his brother Alfred’s finances. In the long term Moisant planned to open an aircraft factory and manufacture dozens of his aluminum airplanes, but for the rest of 1910 he and his troupe of aviators—including Roland Garros, René Simon, and Edmond Audemars—toured America thrilling their legions of fans.
In late December they were performing in New Orleans, and John Moisant had his eyes on a $4,000 prize tabled by the French tire manufacturer André Michelin, for the longest sustained flight of the year. Some of his team, however, were becoming ever more concerned with Moisant’s daredevilry; earlier in the month he’d glided down from nine thousand feet after suffering a frozen carburetor while trying for the world altitude record. One of his business managers, Albert Levino, advised him to be more prudent, but Moisant brushed him off, saying, “There’s no danger in making an airplane flight if the machine is properly adjusted before the ascent is made.” Don’t worry, he told Levino, “I don’t expect to die in an airplane flight.”
Moisant woke early on the morning of Saturday, December 31, in more of a frenzy of activity than usual. He had only a few hours before the window closed on Michelin’s prize. He took off at nine fifty-five A.M. from City Park aviation field in New Orleans, said the correspondent from the Indianapolis Star, “confident of winning the Michelin Cup record for 1910 as a final triumph to his year of achievement.” The reporter was among a sizable crowd that had already gathered to watch his attempt, and for the first few minutes they were treated to some of Moisant’s most daring stunts as he warmed up his machine, including “his famous right circle . . . pronounced the most daring feat ever attempted by an airman.” They purred with delight as Moisant swerved suddenly to the left, then the right—then something went wrong. The machine got caught in one of the holes in the air, and instead of making the famous right circle, it “pointed its nose directly at the ground and came down like a flash.” The first people to reach the wreckage were a group of railroad laborers; they found Moisant lying in some long grass, without a bruise on his body, and with not the “slightest trace of fear or pain” on his face. His neck was broken and death had been instantaneous.
News of Moisant’s death hadn’t yet reached California as the passengers stepped off the Pacific Electric trains at the stop for Aviation Field. The sky was gray and overcast, with the same zephyr as there had been in January, when Louis Paulhan so enraptured the spectators. People skipped along the road in merry anticipation as the sounds of the revving motors grew louder. Whom were they looking forward to seeing most? The daring Frenchman Hubert Latham? Boyish but indestructible Walter Brookins? Eugene Ely? Charles Willard? No, they all wanted to see the hometown hero, Arch Hoxsey.
Five days earlier Hoxsey had climbed to 11,474 feet, a new world’s record, and one he dedicated to his friend Ralph Johnstone, whose Belmont Park mark had been bettered by a Frenchman called Georges Legagneux in early December. Hoxsey had won back the record for the Stardust Twins, but he’d warned his rivals he’d raise the bar even higher before the year was out. His mother, Minnie, had seen him break the record, as she’d seen him on every day of the meet, but today being Saturday she had a few chores to do before she would be able to travel from her Pasadena home.
Hubert Latham was first in the air in his yellow-winged Antoinette, then James Radley took up his Blériot. Hoxsey was in his hangar making his final preparations for his flight when a friend appeared in the doorway. He was panting and held in his hand a newspaper. “It’s an extra,” he said between gasps. “Moisant’s killed!” The friend told reporters later that Hoxsey took the news “almost listlessly” and said in a barely audible voice, “Poor fellow. He must have become tired out fighting the wind.” Hoxsey’s friend was alarmed by his reaction and tried to talk him out of flying that day, but the aviator shook his head and smiled. As his machine was trundled out of its hangar, Hoxsey turned to his friend and put a reassuring hand on his shoulder: “If it’s after me, it’ll get me any other place as well as here.”
Walter Brookins stood in front of the press stand chatting to some reporters as Hoxsey’s biplane rose into the air. Hard to credit, isn’t it, he said, that Arch was here in January as a spectator, and now eleven months later he’s the star turn.
They watched as Hoxsey began to ascend in his familiar long spirals, and Brookins gave a running commentary on his friend’s altitude. Guess he’s at five thousand feet now, six thousand feet, seven thousand feet. Brookins turned to answer a question from a reporter, and as he did, someone in the crowd let out a scream. “Brookins whirled round at the sound of the cry,” wrote the reporter from the Colorado Springs Gazette, and as the biplane dropped from the sky, “. . . he uttered but one word, ‘God,’ his legs gave way and he fell into the roadway. Although he had been in several serious accidents himself, he rose thoroughly unnerved and cried like a child. At the time the field announcers were rushing up and down, shouting through their megaphones: ‘No cause for alarm. Hoxsey is all right.’ But Brookins was not convinced. ‘That’s a lie,’ he shouted back at one of the announcers. ‘Hoxsey’s dead. I know it.’ And again he burst into tears.”
They wouldn’t let Brookins near the crash site. Kind arms ushered him away. Latham had been the first to reach Hoxsey, and Latham now sat in his hangar, silent and white and trembling. The sight of Hoxsey impaled on the wooden strut, his legs contorted under his body, the crushed rib cage, the blood seeping from under the shattered goggles . . . Latham’s mind was seared with the image.
A squad of mounted police patrolled the field, driving away those who wished to ransack Hoxsey’s corpse the way the Denver crowd had Johnstone’s, while other spectators angrily demanded a refund when the organizers canceled the rest of the day’s events. Glenn Curtiss watched in silence, then, turning to his mechanics, he said, “Tear down the bunting, lower all the flags.”
Reporters besieged the home of Minnie Hoxsey for the rest of the day, hoping for a few words. They waited on the porch, well wrapped up against that chill zephyr, and “every little while could be heard the suppressed sounds of sobbing.” Finally, when she had run out of tears, Mrs. Hoxsey emerged from the gloom of her house. “I wish I had gone up with Arch,” she said. “Then I would have died with him. All along I have been in dread he would someday meet with accident, but I rather he would have been killed outright than crippled for life. For, knowing my son as I did, I feel certain he would have lived a life of torment had he been compelled to have gone through life maimed and helpless.” One of the reporters, greedy in his ghoulishness, wanted to know if she would be visiting the undertaking rooms to view her son’s body. She stared long and hard into the reporter’s eyes: “I shall not look on his dead form. I wish to remember him as he was—cheerful, loving, and smiling.”*
Claude Grahame-White heard the news of the double tragedy from his hospital bed in Dover, where he had lain since December 18, after a horrific accident that shattered his leg and ankle, slashed open his temple, and reduced his airplane to “matchwood.” In chasing a $20,000 prize for the longest nonstop flight from England to the Europe an mainland, Grahame-White had crashed into a stone wall on takeoff. He was helped in his recuperation by the charming bedside manner of Pauline Chase, who had returned to England with him in early December. Miss Sears? A delightful young woman, he had told reporters quayside in New York, but she was just a good friend, at least as far as he was concerned. Marry Miss Chase? “Oh, dear, dear. Stop your spoofin’!” he’d said, laughing.
A Grahame-White quip, now that was a rarity in the weeks that had followed the Belmont Park kerfuffle, although admittedly there’d been precious little to smile about for the Englishman since that roistering good evening at Sherry’s. He’d become Public Enemy Number One in the eyes of the American press, with the Philadelphia Inquirer accusing him of “mighty poor sportsmanship,” the New York Morning Telegram labeling him “foolish, unsportsmanlike and grasping,” and the New York Town Topics ridiculing him in a poem called “Discontent”:
Britons never shall be slaves
Britain h’always ruled the air
Blimey, and it ain’t quite fair
Why she shouldn’t rule the air
I’ve a challenge for the world
Everywhere the same I’ve hurled
Blast yer eyes, come get in line
Guided by these rules of mine.
The hostility had eventually died down, but then, on the eve of his departure from New York, Grahame-White was informed that the Wrights had filed suit against him. He was summoned to appear before a circuit court judge on December 4 and told to bring with him details of his earnings in the three months he’d been in America. As for his airplanes, the port authorities in New York had been ordered to embargo them the moment he tried to ship them back to Europe. Grahame-White was livid and he impugned the Wrights’ integrity to the papers because “they had promised they wouldn’t make trouble.” But he wasn’t that surprised, he added, as “the Wrights are frightened. I’ve scared them so bloody well that they are terrified. I’m their most formidable competitor and they know it.”
Grahame-White let it be known that if there was any trouble at New York, he’d contact his friend the British ambassador, in Washington, but behind the threats he moved with alacrity to outwit the Wrights; he sent his machines home on a freighter from Philadelphia, then booked his passage from New York at the very last minute. He left on board the Mauretania, not only with Pauline Chase, booked to play Peter Pan for another season, but with checks totaling $82,000 (approximately $1,312,000 today). That didn’t include the $10,000 for the Statue of Liberty race, a sum he vowed to pursue with the same dogged endurance that he’d exhibited in winning the International Aviation Cup at Belmont Park.
The conquering hero was feted upon his return home. Photographs of Grahame-White posing with the International Aviation Cup adorned the London papers, and in one, the Evening Times, he hinted at skulduggery. Leaving aside the question of the Belmont Park organizers and their tinkering with race rules, the Englishman found it “unaccountable” that Moisant had beaten his time to the Statue of Liberty when he was flying a markedly inferior airplane to his own. “The same judges [who had changed the rules] acclaimed him the winner, and as having beaten my time by forty seconds. This in a thirty-five-mile flight is a narrow margin.” The inference was clear: Grahame-White believed that the judges had knocked off a few minutes from Moisant’s time so that their man would win.
A year later, in December 1911, Grahame-White returned to America, this time alone. He and Pauline Chase had drifted apart six months earlier, and while the aviator had remained tight-lipped on the subject, she was happy to inform reporters from her suite in London’s Savoy Hotel that she had “concluded that Mr. Grahame-White could not compensate me from retirement from the stage.”*
To Chase’s evident dismay, Grahame-White had plowed most of his earnings from 1910 into forming the Grahame-White Aviation Company, and into establishing London’s first aerodrome, at Hendon, on the northern outskirts of the city.
Given his many business commitments throughout 1911, Grahame-White had done precious little flying. One or two exhibitions here and there, but he’d been unable to find the time to participate in the International Aviation Cup race, and in the United States, the Wrights kept him grounded when he returned at the end of the year. Although a judge had thrown out one of the brothers’ suits—the one that demanded a full accounting of Grahame-White’s earnings in 1910—on the issue of the airplane patents the judge was waiting for a panel of experts to report back before delivering his verdict.†
Not that Grahame-White minded his aerial embargo when he arrived in New York in December. On the passage out from England he had got talking to a beautiful American socialite named Dorothy Taylor, and by the time they docked, they were in love. In between calling on old friends such as Armstrong Drexel, Clifford Harmon, and Eleonora Sears—with whom he attended a charity ball in Madison Square Garden*—Grahame-White wined and dined Miss Taylor and had his proposal of marriage accepted.
His spat with the American press had long since been forgotten— particularly since his appeal against Moisant’s victory in the Statue of Liberty race had been successful†—and he happily consented to have lunch with Walter Brookins on December 30 as guests of the World. The venue, appropriately, was the Plaza Hotel, where fourteen months earlier he and Cortlandt Bishop had glared at each other over the International Aviation Cup. Brookins and Grahame-White had never been good friends, but a warm camaraderie prevailed between them as they shook hands like two old soldiers at a regimental reunion.
Brookins, like Drexel, no longer flew. Hoxsey’s death had made him realize that Charles Hamilton was right when he’d said, “We’ll all be killed if we stay in this business.” As for news of other aviators, Brookins informed Grahame-White that Eugene Ely and Tod Shriver were dead, and Hamilton had suffered a nervous breakdown.
The purpose of the lunch was to hear the men’s thoughts on the future of aviation, and the World’s reporter listened intently as the aviators chatted over their food, frequently pausing to smoke cigarettes “with the long drawn inhalation of the devotees.” The question that the newspaper wanted them to answer above all others was, would transatlantic air journeys happen? “I would like to make a bet with anyone that in twenty years’ time we will be flying across the Atlantic Ocean in fifteen hours,” said Grahame-White, taking a sip from his wineglass. “Fifteen hours?” replied Brookins in what the newspaper described as a doubtful tone. “Yes,” asserted Grahame-White, “and by that I mean also that it will be a regular service carrying passengers back and forth between London and New York. It will surely be done long before that time.” Brookins remained skeptical, and later, over dessert, when Grahame-White began talking about airplanes traveling “175 miles or thereabouts an hour,” Brookins “halted the flights of fancy with observations along strictly practical lines.” Further good-natured disagreement occurred when the reporter steered the discussion toward aviation’s role in any future war. Brookins considered the latest German Zeppelin dirigible a most “dreadful” weapon, but Grahame-White reckoned it would soon be rendered obsolete, adding that he was “so optimistic about the airplane in warfare that I fear my views do not agree with most people of today. In fact, I have made it a rule of late to avoid speaking about the uses of the airplane in warfare to avoid being laughed at. People don’t realize the importance of this branch of the military service. It is enough to say that the airplane’s field in military and naval work is unlimited.”
“It’s incredible,” said the old man in a voice unscratched by the passage of time, “that here we are sending up sputniks to the moon, and yet the first airplane flight in Europe was as recent as 1906.” The writer agreed, and in an unobsequious tone pointed out that much of the startling progress was down to men like him, Claude Grahame-White, and the other brave pioneers. Who was left now? he asked, and Grahame-White’s memory traveled slowly back over the years. Not Armstrong Drexel, who had died a few months prior in March 1958, after a life abundant with achievement. A decorated war hero (the First World War, in which Grahame-White had flown bombers against German targets, and in which Roland Garros had distinguished himself as a fighter ace), Drexel had for many years been one of London’s most successful bankers. Walter Brookins had passed away not that long ago, too, in 1953, but the rest were long dead.
Like Garros, Count Jacques de Lesseps had flown in the French air force during World War I, but unlike Garros, de Lesseps had survived, for a few years at least. In 1927 he’d vanished during a survey flight over the Gulf of St. Lawrence; his body was recovered some weeks later, so at least his wife—Grace McKenzie—and his two children had a body to mourn. René Simon and René Barrier had both died in flying accidents in the 1920s, but not Monsieur Le Blanc—dear old Alfred—who never did manage to get his hands on the International Aviation Cup, and who succumbed to illness in 1921. Glenn Curtiss had also died in his bed from complications following appendicitis surgery in 1930. The Wrights’ bêtenoir went to his grave with a reputation as America’s greatest aircraft manufacturer, having founded the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company. He had been a pioneer of the seaplane, and his H-12 flying boat was used by the British during the war. Then, in 1919, Curtiss’s NC-4 flying boat became the first aircraft to successfully cross the Atlantic, in a voyage that included a stop in the Azores. Although Curtiss’s involvement in the aviation industry effectively ceased in the 1920s, his company merged with the Wrights’ to become the Curtiss-Wright Corporation in 1929. During World War II they produced, among others, the Curtiss-Wright C-46 Commando transport plane and the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter.
Tuberculosis had claimed Charles Hamilton in 1914, but in truth he’d been dead long before that, since the day he’d been admitted to the madhouse. And Hubert Latham, with whom Grahame-White had enjoyed such a splendid dinner at Sherry’s, had never flown again after Hoxsey’s death. Instead he had returned to his first love, big-game hunting. The odds were better. But in the summer of 1912, deep in the Congo, Latham was trampled to death by a buffalo.
Latham’s legacy was the same as that of all the other aviators who had been killed in the nine short years since Orville and Wilbur Wright had proved it possible that man could fly: their courage had silenced the world’s skepticism and proved that the air was indeed conquerable—in an airplane. Perhaps it was tragically appropriate that as news of Latham’s death reached the United States, Melvin Vaniman embarked in the Akron on another attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an airship. The dirigible had just crossed the New Jersey coastline when it exploded. Neither Vaniman nor any of his four crew members survived.
Despite his vigorously stated belief in the efficacy of the airship in the days following the America debacle, Walter Wellman never again took to the skies. The rest of his days passed by uneventfully, though the happy occasions—such as the marriage of his daughter Rebecca to Fred Aubert— were balanced by spells of misery, such as his short prison term in 1926 for failure to pay a $250 debt. Wellman died of liver cancer in 1934, the same decade in which the world decided that dirigible aviation had no serious future.
Two years after Wellman’s death, Alan Hawley died at age sixty-eight. His passion for balloon flight had cooled after his experiences in the Canadian wilderness, but in its place had grown an intense ardor for the airplane, following his visit to Belmont Park. Hawley was elected president of the Aero Club of America in 1913, and over the next six years he was at the forefront of the drive to incorporate aircraft into the U.S. military. As well as being one of the organizers of the Lafayette Escadrille—the squadron of American airmen who flew in the French air force during the First World War—Hawley also campaigned for the establishment of an aerial reserve corps of the National Guard.
Right up until his death in 1936, Hawley remained good friends with Augustus Post, who, like his former pi lot, had shown no inclination to continue ballooning after the 1910 victory. Instead Post, once he’d got his divorce out of the way, wrote and lectured extensively on aeronautics, and for a while in the 1920s, he edited a journal called Aero Mechanics. In November 1949 his photograph appeared in the newspapers when he led a campaign for the resurrection of the International Balloon Race, ten years after its demise. The goatee was still there, though with a seam of gray, the eyes shone with vitality, and age hadn’t withered his turn of phrase. “There’s really no sensation in the world like that of floating between the earth and the heavens with the winds of the world,” he explained to a reporter, having enjoyed a brief flight in a free balloon as part of his campaign. “Some of my friends claim you can create the same feeling by partaking of four very dry martinis on an empty stomach— but I don’t believe it.” Post died three years later aged seventy-eight, and though the balloon race wasn’t reestablished in his lifetime, it has been held annually since 1983.
Grahame-White died in August 1959, two days before his eightieth birthday, and a few weeks before the publication of his biography. His death went largely unreported around the world, most notably in Britain, where he had long since been forgotten. For years he had lived in Monte Carlo—enjoying the sun and the sea, and the casinos—and his involvement in aviation had ended shortly after the war when he sold the Hendon aerodrome to the British government for approximately $2 million. He’d never needed to work again, but he went into the real estate business with spectacular results.
After his death Grahame-White’s vast collection of scrapbooks were donated to the Royal Air Force Museum, and among all the clippings and photographs was a column from the Chicago Daily Tribune, published two days after Ralph Johnstone’s death in November 1910. It wasn’t written as an epitaph for Johnstone, but it could have been, just as it could have been an epitaph for Grahame-White, Hoxsey, Moisant, Latham, Le Blanc, de Lesseps, and all the other pioneers who, in the early years of the twentieth century, set sail from earth to explore a new world.
The love of excitement, of fame, of money; the desire to step softly around a sleeping danger, to place a hand on death and vault over it, to tiptoe over destruction and have a multitude watch the act; the ambition to go into the unknown, to test sensations which timid persons could never know—these were the incentives mixed with others governing quiet men of no spectacular accomplishments, seeking merely the perfection of a new science, the full outlines of a new discovery.
Such men were on the five vessels of Fernando Magellan when they cast off from their moorings in the Guadalquivir on Aug. 10, 1519. Such men were on the solitary Victoria when that surviving and circumnavigating ship dropped anchor in Seville on Sept. 9, 1522.
Such men were with Vasco da Gama when he sailed from Lisbon to find his way around the Cape of Good Hope and on the Malabar coast; such men were with John Cabot when he found the Newfoundland coast; were with Jacques Cartier when he sailed up the St. Lawrence; were with Drake when with the loot of Spanish ships in his hold he found the northern Pacific coast and took the western route home.
Such a crowd as that which saw Johnstone’s fall gathered along the banks of the Guadalquivir on Aug. 10, 1519, when Magellan’s ships got under way, a wonder-stricken crowd, prepared for new astonishments, gaping wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the men who were to feel their way through the unknown into new worlds. Such crowds in Cadiz, Seville, Lisbon, saw the straggling return of ships with strange treasures and wonderful narratives.
The parallel should not be forced, but one finds the characteristics of an earlier age of daring and discovery reproduced in the present one, the same desires and ambitions controlling with results not dissimilar. The martyrdom of the victims may not be conscious and thinking, but the failure which sends one aerial navigator to his death may point to an undiscovered defect in his mechanism, a flaw at which inventiveness has hesitated until stimulated.
The dead, whatever may have been the incentives which sent them into danger, are giving themselves to the cause which seeks ultimate control of a new highway.
* A fortnight after the crash Wilbur Wright told reporters Johnstone’s death was caused by a “weak wing,” and in the opinion of some historians, this accident, so soon after Brookins’s crash at Belmont Park, confirmed that “high noon had come and gone in the careers of the Wright brothers,” partly because they channeled so much of their energy into lawsuits, they neglected the developmental side of their business. They dissolved their exhibition team in 1911, and the following year Wilbur died of typhoid, aged forty-five. Orville died in 1948, aged seventy-six.
† In September 1911 Johnstone’s widow began flying lessons, telling newspapers that her husband had left little money and she needed to “clothe, feed and educate” her son, and she intended to do so by becoming one of the world’s first female aviators. However, this ambitious idea came to naught. In 1920 Ralph junior was found shot dead in Florida; local police said it was suicide, but after a four-year campaign by Mrs. Johnstone, a man was convicted of her son’s murder.
* Arch Hoxsey’s death was later attributed to heart failure, and it was assumed he was dead by the time his airplane hit the ground. His mother, who had received $50 a month from her son, was given an annuity by the Wrights.
* Chase married into a wealthy British family in 1914, swapping the stage for the home and raising three children. She died in England in 1962 aged seventy-six.
† Not until January 1914 did the Wrights finally win their patent suit against all other aircraft manufacturers. However, companies such as Glenn Curtiss’s exploited several legal loopholes without prosecution, and in 1917 (by which time Orville Wright had sold his company), when the USA entered World War I, the American aviation industry finally forgot its differences and began to work together.
* Sears never married but devoted her life to sporting attainments, winning nearly 250 trophies. As a tennis player she reached the third round of the Wimbledon tennis championships in 1923, and in 1928 she became the first women’s squash champion. She died in 1968 aged eighty-seven.
† Grahame-White won his appeal on the grounds that the original rules had stated that every competitor must have flown for one continuous hour prior to entering, which neither Moisant nor de Lesseps had achieved. He collected the check for $10,000 (plus $334 interest) from President Taft at a dinner of the Aero Club of America in January 1912.