Alexander
Graham Bell and the AEA
The Scottish-born inventor of the telephone, Alexander
Graham Bell, who had grown rich from his
1876 invention, had been
present for some of the failed tests of
Langley’s Aerodrome. Bell was
interested not just because
he was a friend of Langley’s, but because he had dabbled
with the question of flight
and had experimented with kites
made of many pyramid-like cells
(sometimes as many
as three thousand). He called these “tetrahedral
kites,” and their aerodynamics
were similar to the box kite.
The
sight of a large complex structure flying in the wind
was certainly
impressive and gave Bell the idea that the
tetrahedral kite could be used as the basis for a
heavier-than-air craft. At
the insistence of his wife, Mabel, and with her
financial support. Bell
assembled a small group and formed
the Aerial Experiment Association (AEA) in the
summer of 1907.
The group
met first at the Bell summer home
at Baddeck, Nova Scotia, and in 1908 moved
to Hammondsport to he near
Curtiss’ shop and Keuka Lake. The
group—known as “Bell’s
Boys”—consisted of two Canadian
engineers, John A.D. McCurdy and
Frederick W. “Casey” Baldwin (not
related to Curtiss’ balloonist
friend); a U.S. Army officer, Lieutenant
Thomas Selfridge, assigned
by the War Department at Bell’s
request; and Glenn Curtiss, who at that
time had nearly no involvement in
aviation outside of providing engines for Thomas Baldwin’s
dirigibles.
Curtiss quickly became the driving force of the
AEA, being designated director of experiments and given the
largest stipend of the group. The strategy of the AEA was
reminiscent of Chanute’s approach a decade earlier—each of
the members would design an aircraft that would be outfitted
with a Curtiss engine and tested, in the hope that five
different approaches would yield the best possible airplane.
The group started with one of Bell’s kites, the Cygnet I,
tested on December 6, 1907, and piloted by Selfridge. It was
clear that this design was not going to yield a controllable
aircraft. Bell, now sixty, accepted this disappointment and,
to his credit, continued his support of the AEA. The next
aircraft tested was a Selfridge design called the Red Wing
(because of its bright red wing fabric)—it was piloted by
Baldwin and flown over frozen Keuka Lake on March 12, 1908,
before a huddled audience.
The aircraft flew some 320 feet
(97.5m) at an altitude of about twenty feet (6m) for
approximately twenty seconds, and then crashed onto its
wing. Baldwin was unhurt and the AEA was able to claim its
first success. The public reports of the Red Wing’s success
were particularly galling to the Wrights since Selfridge had
written to them asking specific questions about design,
giving the brothers the impression that he was inquiring as
an official of the U.S. Army.
The AEA next experimented with
a design of Baldwin’s dubbed the White Wing. This aircraft
used triangular wing-tip ailerons at the ends of both wings
to control the aircraft, and performed excellently when
flown on May 18 by Selfridge, and then by Curtiss.
Selfridge’s report to the Associated Press made it clear
that the AEA airplane had the ability to land and take off
immediately on its wheeled undercarriage, dispensing with
the Wrights’ derrick catapulting method and landing skids.
The group believed that their problems with the Wright
brothers’ patents were finally over with this, the first
successful use of ailerons in the United States.
Unfortunately, on May 20, with an inexperienced McCurdy
piloting the White Wing, the plane crashed. The AEA now
turned to its crowning achievement: the Curtiss-designed
June Bug, which incorporated all that was learned from the
previous two efforts. The airplane was controlled in flight
by the wing-tip ailerons and had a wheeled undercarriage
(and raised skids in case a hard landing crushed the
wheels). Most important, it used a wing design that had been
inadvertent in the earlier Red Wing and White Wing but which
was discovered to boost stability and control.
The earlier aircraft had been built with
their lower wings curved upward to prevent them from bumping
on the ice and slowing down the plane. (Recall that at Kitty
Hawk Wilbur had to run alongside the Flyer to keep the
wingtip from dragging in the sand.) The only way this could
be accomplished with wings so light was to curve the
upper wing downward. The result was a double-wing
configuration that made the plane look like a narrow eye
when viewed head-on. When wings are slanted upward from the
horizontal plane, that is known as “dihedral”; this
configuration keeps the aircraft locked when it banks into a
turn and prevents it from slipping sideways.
Wings slanted down-ward are called “anhedral”;
this gives an aircraft more vertical control. The
combination of dihedral and anhedral wing design gave the
aileroned June Bug control that rivalled the Wright Flyer.
The aerodynamics of this configuration were not well
understood in 1909, certainly not by the courts that heard
the Wright patent suit. A better understanding might have
vindicated the AEA design as an alternative means of
airplane control, putting an end to the litigation that hurt
the Wrights. Less than a month after the crash of the White
Wing, the June Bug was ready. Curtiss entered it in a
competition sponsored by the magazine Scientific American
which offered a trophy and a twenty-five-hundred-dollar cash
award for the first public flight over a 0.6-mile (1km)
straight course.
The entire competition had been the
brainchild of the magazine’s publisher, Charles A. Munn, who
felt bad about how his magazine had treated the early
reports about the Wright brothers and who was making
virtually a gift of the prize and the money to the Wrights.
All they had to do was step forward and claim it. The
Wrights steadfastly refused (even declining the written
pleas of Munn), claiming that their plane did not meet the
qualification of taking off unassisted. Wilbur was off to
France to demonstrate their Model A, and Orville was too
busy preparing for the trials at Fort Myer, Virginia, to
make the necessary modifications. But the truth was that the
Wrights were not so easily placated and would probably have
turned Munn down anyway. This left the field open for the
AEA, and on July 4 Curtiss flew his craft over the
prescribed course at Stony Brook Farm, Hammondsport, and
claimed the prize much to the embarrassment of Munn.
Glenn Curtiss and the AEA team are seen
here on the morning
of March 12, 1908, at the first flight of the June Bug.
Graham Bell’s Cygnet II
was a tetrahedral kite
(the craft had to be towed to become airborne),
one of many constructed and tested.
The event was widely covered in the press
and bolstered the impression that the AEA was a worthy rival
of the Wrights. The AEA tested one more plane, John
McCurdy’s Silver Dart, which, on February 23, 1909, became
the first plane to fly in Canada. When Bell disbanded the
AEA in March 1909, he pointed to the death of Selfridge in
the Fort Myer accident (described next) and the loss of
Curtiss, who went off to market his aircraft, as the
reasons.
More than likely, Bell had continuing
doubts about what the outcome of a patent fight with the
Wrights would be and he wanted no part of being on the
losing side. (The fact is, he did have his lawyers inspect
the June Bug for possible patents and received a
discouraging report.) And Bell may have gradually lost
interest once it was clear his tetrahedral kites were not to
be a part of aviation’s future. In the summer of 1908,
Orville Wright was preparing to test his airplane for the
Army and a great deal hung in the balance.
The successes of the AEA that spring and summer
had cast some doubt as to whether the Wrights were the best
airplane manufacturers available, especially when it was
reported that the AEA was preparing to sell their planes at
one-fifth the Wrights’ price. Orville’s consternation must
have strained even his stolid character when he discovered
that the military observer who was to evaluate the plane and
actually go up as a passenger was none other than Thomas Selfridge, who had come to the trials in the company of Curtiss himself.
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