Rivalry Between Wright Brothers and Glenn Curtiss

choi

Patrick Cooke, Up, Up and Away; While Glenn Curtiss was setting records, the Wright brothers fumed, fell behind and filed lawsuits. Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2014
online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303825604579518003129173432
(book review on Lawrence Goldstone, Birdman; The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss and the battle to control the skies. Ballantine, 2014)

Note:
(a)
(i) Ballantine (founded in 1952 by Ian Ballantine with his wife, Betty; ultimately acquired by Bertelsmann AG)  Wikipedia
(ii) The Scottish surnames Ballantine/Ballentine are from the name “of two places (in Roxburgh and Selkirk) called Bellenden, of unknown origin.”

(b) “There is a magnificent exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air & Space Museum in Washington devoted to the Wright Brothers and their Wright Flyer, acknowledged to be the first airplane to have made a manned flight under power.
The museum's staging features a nattily dressed mannequin representing Orville [the younger of the pair] Wright in the Flyer's cockpit on the historic day in December 1903 at Kitty Hawk, NC. What no such exhibit can convey is that Orville was a vindictive SOB whose greed and begrudgery were surpassed only by those of his brother Wilbur, who so loathed the Smithsonian—it [Smithsonian] named another airplane instead of the Flyer as the first successful manned craft—that he initially bequeathed the brothers' celebrated plane to the Science Museum of London.”
(i) Wright Flyer
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_Flyer
(section 4 The Flyer after Kitty Hawk: Since 2003 it has resided in a special exhibit in the museum titled "The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Aerial Age", honoring the Wright Brothers in recognition of the 100th anniversary of their first flight)
(ii) Wright brothers
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers
("Five people witnessed the [first] flights" on Dec 17, 1903, inluding one who took the photos; “Modern analysis by Professor Fred EC Culick and Henry R Jex (in 1985) has demonstrated that the 1903 Wright Flyer was so unstable as to be almost unmanageable by anyone but the Wrights, who had trained themselves in the 1902 glider”)

(c) “The main target of the brothers' ill will was aviation pioneer and fellow genius Glenn Curtiss, an easygoing hick from Hammondsport in upstate New York.”
(i) Glenn Curtiss
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Curtiss
(1878 – 1930; his formal education extended only to Grade 8; Curtiss made the first officially witnessed flight in North America [on July 4, 1908 by flying Aerodrome #3, also known as June Bug [qv]; two photos]; section 4 Aviation pioneer: Alexander Graham Bell)

Compare: “Both [Wright] brothers attended high school, but did not receive diplomas.”  Wikipedia
(ii) Go to images.google.com and enter (june bug flight). There is no need to view a video clip, because its flight is too quick for the eye to discern how june bug does it.
(iii) The English surnames Curtiss/Curtis means “courteous.”
(iv) Hammondsport, New York
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammondsport,_New_York
(a village; Lazarus Hammond founded the village around 1827)
(v) Langley Aerodrome
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langley_Aerodrome
(Samuel Pierpont Langley [1834 – 1906] coined the word "Aerodrome"--he term is derived from Greek words meaning "air runner")

Quote: “With Smithsonian approval, Glenn Curtiss extensively modified the Aerodrome and made a few short flights in it in 1914, as part of an unsuccessful attempt to bypass the Wright Brothers' patent on aircraft and to vindicate Langley. Based on these flights, the Smithsonian displayed the Aerodrome in its museum as the first heavier-than-air manned, powered aircraft "capable of flight." This action triggered a feud with Orville Wright (Wilbur Wright had died in 1912), who accused the Smithsonian of misrepresenting flying machine history. Orville backed up his protest by refusing to donate the original 1903 Kitty Hawk Flyer to the Smithsonian, instead donating it to extensive collections of the Science Museum of London in 1928. The dispute finally ended in 1942 when the Smithsonian published details of the Curtiss modifications to the Aerodrome and recanted its claims for the aircraft.

(vi) English definition:
drome (n; French, from Ancient Greek dromos, "running"):
“the crab plover (Dromas ardeola), a North African bird allied to the oystercatcher”
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/drome


(d) “Wilbur, who had quit high school before graduation, devoured them all at the local library and by mail order. He and Orville built a homemade wind tunnel to test various air foils and discovered that the lift-and-drag tables employed by most serious experimenters were flawed. After more than 1,000 test flights at Kitty Hawk using gliders and their own calculations, the brothers hit upon an idea: Wilbur had observed that buzzards twisted their wings in flight, offering surfaces to the wind at different angles for turning and staying aloft. The brothers rigged a system of ropes and pulleys that would allow a pilot to ‘warp’ the Flyer's wings separately and thereby manipulate its course and trajectory. With thrust provided by propellers connected to a small gasoline motor, the brothers in 1903 soared 120 feet for 12 seconds of controlled flight.”
(i) airfoil
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airfoil
(ii) The noun foil here means “thin sheet of metal,” as in “aluminum foil.”

(e) “For the next four years they [Wright brothers] refined the system for longer flights and all but locked away their breakthrough while seeking a patent on the wing-warping system. It was during this embargo that they were visited by Curtiss * * * the meeting would torment the Wright brothers for years, particularly after Curtiss's planes became steadily superior to their own. * * * While Curtiss was winning prizes, setting records and exploring new ideas with his products—he created the first seaplane—the Wrights fumed and fell behind in innovation.”
(i) Curtiss Model E
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtiss_Model_E
(became the [US] Navy's first aircraft when ordered on 8 May 1911 and received the designation A-1)
(ii) Curtiss Model E Flying Boat. 1912 (Credit: Library of Congress, Washington, DC (neg. no. LC-DIG-ggbain-11555)
www.britannica.com/EBchecked/med ... oneer-Glenn-Hammond
(there was a hull)

(f) “There are ‘Ragtime’-like cameo appearances in Mr. Goldstone's story, by Alexander Graham Bell, Teddy Roosevelt and D.W. Griffith, among others. But no figure looms larger than Lincoln Beachey (1887-1915), the greatest practitioner of ‘air deviltry’ in history. There wasn't an insane stunt that Beachey wouldn't attempt. His tricks bore names like the Corkscrew Twist and, his most breath-taking, the Dip of Death, a maneuver that required him to dive at full speed toward the ground only to swoop out of the plunge at the last second. Beachey knew his audience. ‘They come to see me die,’ he said. They eventually saw what they came for in San Francisco on March 14, 1915, when Beachey augered into the Pacific and drowned.
(i) DW Griffith
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._W._Griffith(1875-1948; an American film director)
(ii) Lincoln J Beachey
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_J._Beachey

Quote:

“After that, [in 1910] Beachey joined the exhibition team of aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss. (Inventor of the moveable ‘aeleron’ [sic] as an improvement of the Wright brother's ‘wing warping’ design—which required more fragile wings capable of being bent in order to turn, or bank.)

“His stunt speciality was the ‘dip-of-death,’ where he would take his plane up to 5,000 feet (1,500 m), and dive toward the ground at full speed with his hands outstretched. At the very last moment he would level the plane and zoom down the raceway, with his hands off of the controls, gripping the control stick with his knees)

(A) aileron
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileron
(its functional analog, wing warping [qv; patented by the Wright brothers])
(B) aileron (n; French, from diminutive of aile wing — more at AISLE; First Known Use 1909)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aileron

(g) “By the time Glenn Curtiss retired in 1920, he had invented, among many other things, retractable landing gear, the enclosed cockpit, the tricycle landing gear and the airboat. He established the first civilian flying school and delivered the first radio communication from an airplane. Meanwhile, the Wright brothers were still dragging their perceived enemies into court.”

airboat
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airboat
(section 2 History)