7. GLENN HAMMOND CURTISS
Glenn Hammond Curtiss was born in 1878 in Hammondsport, New York on Keuka Lake in the Finger Lakes. His father was a harness maker. His formal education ended with the eighth grade, but he went to work for the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company – later to become Eastman Kodak – in Rochester, New York. His first job was to stencil numbers on the paper backing of film. Give a genius a boring job and he or she will soon find a way to streamline it. He came up with a “stencil machine,” a rack with a brush attached that would stencil one hundred of the paper strips with a single stroke. Of course, this considerably improved his productivity and the company adopted his device. He also built his own camera.
He also worked as a Western Union bicycle messenger, became a bicycle racer, and eventually owned a bicycle shop – a prerequisite for success in American pioneer aviation! That led to a fascination with early motorcycles – and internal combustion engines. In 1902 he began manufacturing his own motorcycles. He designed his own carburetor, building it out of a tomato soup can!
He raced his motorcycles too, beating out E. H. Corson’s Indian cycles. Corson was impressed and came to visit Curtiss. He was even more amazed to find that Curtiss’ entire motorcycle works was simply the back room of his shop. He built a v-8 engine and set land speed records. Racing was his place for test and evaluation. He soon became known for his engines – and their suitability for use in aircraft!
California Aeronaut Tom Baldwin used a Curtiss engine in his dirigible in 1904, and convinced Curtiss that the future lay in motorized aviation. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, was experimenting with heavier-than-air aviation using tetrahedral kites. He asked Curtiss to develop an engine that could be reliably used in this application. Bell founded the Aerial Experiment Association and Curtiss became an important contributing member.
On July 4, 1908, Curtiss flew the AEA’s plane, which he had designed, to win a prize offered by Scientific American – making the first pre-announced flight of an airplane in America. This plane would become the prototype for Curtiss’ own production airplanes. In 1909 Curtiss left the AEA and joined with A. M. Herring of the Aero Club of America to build airplanes.
It was at the Grande Semaine d'Aviation de la Champagne that Curtiss won the overall speed record, beating out two Wright planes. On May 29, 1910, Curtiss made the first long distance flight between two U. S. cities. Though it was a mere 137 mile distance, The four hour trip won him a $10,000 prize put up by Joseph Pulitzer. He was also awarded permanent possession of the Scientific American Trophy.
Betty Scott
Curtiss also trained pilots for his aircraft. In 1910 his student Blanch Stuart (Betty) Scott became America’s first woman pilot of record. In the early days of the automobile, Betty had driven her father’s car around Rochester. The adventuresome girl’s driving so terrorized the city that the city council tried to ban her from driving – but since there were no drivers’ licenses in that day, it proved impossible to revoke one.
In 1910, Betty drove a Willys-Overland Model 38 automobile from New York City to San Francisco, sponsored by the Willys-Overland Company. Her car was named “Lady Overland.” But Betty was actually the second woman to drive across the country, as Alice Huyler Ramsey had already driven the trip in the opposite direction.
Betty Scott became a professional pilot, flying for the Curtiss Exhibition Team. She became an accomplished stunt flyer and set distance records. She became the first woman test pilot when Glenn L. Martin hired her to fly his prototype planes before the final blueprints were drawn up. She became the first woman to fly in a jet plane when Chuck Yeager took her up in a TF-80C on September 6, 1948.
Knowing her background, Yeager performed some snap rolls and a 14,000 foot dive for Betty, who was now retired, but still very much an aviation enthusiast. Yeager would later train Jackie Cochran for her air speed record flights.
Tom Swift and His Airship
Curtiss, for his part, inspired the Victor Appleton series about a young inventor – which were set on a lake in Upstate New York. The real Curtiss continued to perfect airplanes, demonstrating their practicality for military applications. His JN-4 “Jenny” became a workhorse for U. S., Canadian, and British forces. Thousands were made. He also developed flying boats.
In 1917 the U. S. Navy commissioned Curtiss to build the NC series four-engine seaplane. NC-4 would become the first plane to fly across the Atlantic. A crew of U. S. Navy and Coast Guard aviators flew the plane from New York State to Lisbon, Portugal in nineteen days. Stops were made for repairs, refueling, and crew rest in Massachusetts, Nova Scotia, and the Azores. Two weeks later, John Alcock and Arthur Brown would make the first nonstop flight in a Vickers Vimy bomber, flying from St. John’s Newfoundland to Ireland.
The Daily Mail had put up a £10,000 prize for such a flight, and Alcok and Brown were presented the prize by non-other then Sir Winston Churchill, then Britain’s Secretary of State for Air.
‘Yesterday I was in America, and I am the first man in Europe to say that,’ said John Alcock after his transatlantic flight with Arthur Whitten Brown.
Curtiss, Like Blériot, fought a series of patent lawsuits from the Wrights from 1909 until the great war broke out. Desperately needing aircraft, the military pressured the Wrights and Curtiss to resolve the dispute. Though the Wrights eventually won their suits against Curtiss, the work of Curtiss proved conclusively that “invention is rarely created in a vacuum.” – M. K. Wharton
Curtiss rebuilt Samuel Langley’s Aerodrome to prove this. The rule that there must be a ‘first’ in everything says that the Wrights first flew a powered heavier-than-air machine. But without Langley, Blériot, Curtiss, and a host of others, working on both sides of the Atlantic, there would not have been the progress in aviation and aerospace engineering celebrated in this series of articles. Ruminating on the thoughts of my granddaughter – sometimes history tells us too may facts we don’t want to know, sometimes not enough. Aviation is one place where “not enough” seems to be the rule.
Glenn L. Martin would go on to build his own PBM Flying Boats. My parents were on the engineering team that perfected them. Their part in aviation – and aerospace work is the reason I want to, in this bit of history, want to know more!
