Chasing Icarus Read online

  With the equilibrator on the beach, the volunteers returned to the balloon house. On Wellman’s command, they carefully untethered the guy ropes that anchored the airship to the ground. Up close, the men holding the guy ropes could see where the seams of the envelope’s cotton and silk layers had been cemented with three emulsions of rubber. If they looked closely they could even make out where extra strips had been glued to cover the needle holes and prevent the escape of hydrogen. In his subsequent account of the expedition, Wellman described how the gas bag worked by inviting readers to measure off with your hands what will approximate a cubic foot of air. It is apparently impalpable, without substance or weight. Yet our physics tell us this cubic foot of air has a weight approximating 1.2 ounces.

  Now if we have a box containing exactly one cubic foot of air, and if we force the air out and put in its place hydrogen weighing only .1 ounce per cubic foot, the box is 1.1 ounces lighter than it was before. If the box should be made of a substance so flimsy that its weight was only one ounce, it would rise in the air because it and its contents together are lighter than air. Multiply our one cubic foot by 345,000— the volume of the gas reservoir of the airship America—and what do we have? We have taken out 345,000 cubic feet of air, weighing 414,000 ounces, or 25,800 pounds; and we have put in 345,000 cubic feet of hydrogen weighing 34,500 ounces, or 2,150 pounds. By this simple means we have gained a lifting force of 23,650 pounds—the difference between the weight of the air displaced and the gas which displaces it. In the case of America the gas bag, with its valves, inner balloons for air, and other appurtenances, weighs approximately 4,700 pounds; hence, the net lifting force is 18,950 pounds. In other words, the gas can carry the weight of the balloon and a load of nearly 91.2 tons besides.

  The men walked forward on Wellman’s order, and as the nose of the 228-foot-long airship appeared at the hangar entrance like some great mythological monster emerging from its cave, the bystanders outside gasped in astonishment. “The crowd, constantly augmented in numbers, as the news of the proposed flight spread through the city, lost its skepticism when they saw the balloon move from the hangar,” wrote a watching reporter from the Fort Wayne Daily News. Suddenly everyone began to believe that Wellman was serious in his intention to sail across the Atlantic.

  Vaniman and his two assistant engineers, twenty-four-year-old Lewis Loud and Fred Aubert, climbed into the 156-foot-long steel passenger car that was directly underneath the America’s gas bag [envelope] and secured to it with 188 hempen cords. The car was enclosed but had several celluloid windows, and in its floor was the gasoline tank. To the rear of the car was the engine room, connected to the pi lot’s seat by a speaking tube. The lifeboat was suspended six feet under the car, and Jack Irwin, the twenty-nine-year-old Australian wireless operator, hopped in and made a final check that the America’s Marconi wireless installation, housed in one of the watertight compartments, was properly functioning.

  Scores of spectators gathered around, oohing and aahing as they caught sight of the wireless. Three months earlier a Marconi had been responsible for apprehending the notorious Dr. Crippen in mid-Atlantic as he fled En-gland for his native America on board the Montrose. At this very moment the doctor was on trial in a London court for the murder of his wife, and to most people the Marconi wireless was only marginally less fascinating than a flying machine. Fascinating, but incomprehensible. People couldn’t begin to understand that the steel frame of the car would act throughout the voyage as the wireless radiator and the equilibrator cable as its earth connection. The lifeboat would also be the ship’s galley, though in reality this was nothing more than a gasoline stove with aluminum utensils. Well-man shooed away the crowd from the boat and ran through the inventory of food packed in another of the watertight compartments: bread, beans, bacon, coffee, malted milk, boiled ham, eggs, tinned meats. Enough provisions for thirty days, at a stretch.

  The crew grudgingly posed for a photograph, scornful of the pressmen who had for thirty days insinuated they were charlatans. Only Irwin appeared to take it all in stride; he stood in the center of the group, hands in his pockets, beaming for the camera. Murray Simon, the English steamship officer who had been hired as a navigator, was dressed as if he were going for a punt on the river Thames, dapper in a tie and wing collar, and a straw boater that surely wouldn’t last long once they were in the air. Wellman’s salt-and-pepper mustache bristled as he fielded the first question from the press pack. Was it true that the French motor expert Jean Jacon refused to fly because he had not been paid?* Wellman wouldn’t be drawn into a war of words. How long did he estimate it would take him to reach England? He replied that he counted on covering the three thousand miles in ten days. One or two of the reporters gave a whistle of surprise. Why, that would mean three hundred miles a day? It was possible. And did he regard the trip as dangerous? “We do not know,” said Wellman. “That there is in it some risk to life is apparent. How great this risk must remain an unknown quantity till we have put it to the test. Once well on our way, the danger of fire or explosion will be ever present in our minds. The combination of a ton of inflammable hydrogen, nearly three tons of gasoline, sparking motors, electric light, and wireless is not one to inspire confidence.”

  Wellman added that they had taken all possible precautions, insulating the engines with steel gauze and asbestos, placing the gas valve far aft, and carrying the exhaust from the motors well out from the gasoline tank. But they could do only so much. “Lightning may strike the ship and fire the hydrogen,” he explained. “Our equilibrator may not ride well in heavy seas and by its shocks injure the airship, or it may possibly foul some ship or fishing vessel. Both engines may break down . . .” Wellman’s voice trailed off as he spotted his wife, Laura, and two of his five daughters in the crowd. Their doleful countenance told him he had said enough. They, like the other crew member’s families, were all too familiar with the fate of Oscar Erbslöh, the celebrated German balloonist who, along with his crew of five, had been killed three months earlier when their airship exploded in midair.

  Wellman smiled at his wife as he addressed the pressmen: “Our lifeboat is hung with an instantaneous releasing device and is at all times kept fully equipped . . . We aim to follow as closely as we can the steamer lane from New York to the English Channel, and if we should be so fortunate as to be able to keep fairly on the course, help would not be far away in case of accident.”

  Wellman’s farewell to his family was brief. Three kisses, a few words, and then he was gone, too distressed to steal a backward glance. Fred Aubert, the youngest member of the expedition, tried to look as bold as his twenty years would allow as he climbed the ladder. He turned, exchanged shy glances with Rebecca, his sweetheart—one of Wellman’s daughters—then he, too, was gone.

  Last up was Vaniman. For a few seconds he stood at the foot of the ladder arguing with Wellman about the airship’s cat, Kiddo. The chief engineer could hear the gray tabby meowing pitifully from the car. “I don’t want that cat on board,” he shouted. “Blasted thing will keep me awake.” Simon reminded everyone that it was considered bad luck to let a cat leave a ship, but Vaniman didn’t care a fig for maritime traditions. He pulled himself aboard and threw the cat into a bag. “Cast off!” yelled Wellman at the same moment, and before Vaniman had a chance to lower the bag on the end of a rope, the America began to rise. It was five minutes past eight and Simon marked their departure with an entry in the log: “Now we will make these blooming critics eat their own words. They have been hammering us for the last month, ridiculing our ‘worn-out gas-bag,’ an ‘old coffee-mill for motor,’ telling us we should never leave sight of land . . . now let those landlubbers who are afraid of their own shadows and who like to criticize others, let the blighters go to blazes.”

  At about the time the America lifted into the fog, a compatriot of Simon’s was rising gingerly from his bed in a Washington, D.C., hotel room. Claude Grahame-White examined his bruises and counted his blessings. The day befo
re he had nearly lost his life when his airplane was caught on the beam by a gust of wind as he took off from Washington’s Benning racetrack, hurling him from the track at sixty miles per hour, through one fence, then another, before coming to rest in a muddy field. His escape, so the morning newspapers all agreed, had been nothing short of a miracle. Grahame-White was pleased to read that most papers had condensed details of the crash into just a couple of paragraphs, appended to the main report about his visit to the White House earlier in the day. It was the lead story in the Washington Post, accompanied by a series of dashing photographs. The paper called the stunt “the most remarkable and daring landing ever made from such a height by an aviator, either native or foreign.” It then described how thousands of people had deserted their offices, stores, and factories and watched openmouthed as the white-winged biplane circled first the Washington Monument, then the dome of the Capitol, before making a perfect landing on the asphalt of Executive Avenue and rolling to a stop a few feet from the White House gates. President Taft had been away on business, but the first man to help Grahame-White down from his seat was Admiral Dewey, the hero of Manila. “A wonderful piece of work you have just performed,” boomed the admiral. “I want to congratulate you on the remarkable feat.”

  A cluster of other high-ranking military officers had quickly arrived on the scene, among them Brigadier General James Allen, head of the Army Signal Corps, and the man responsible for military aviation in America. Grahame-White was soon on his way to the Metropolitan Club for lunch and more handshakes, while back on Executive Avenue soldiers encircled the biplane and kept inquisitive citizens at bay.

  Grahame-White’s social call to the White House hadn’t been impromptu; like everything else in his life it was meticulously planned. Together with an American friend, Clifford Harmon, a property tycoon turned amateur aviator, and his business manager, Sydney McDonald, Grahame-White had concocted the visit as a way of promoting the airplane, and himself. Harmon was on good terms with the chief of the Washington police, and he’d arranged for traffic to be barred from Executive Avenue between eleven A.M. and midday on the Friday.

  That the police agreed was a mark of the esteem in which Grahame-White was held in the United States, a mere six weeks since his arrival. He had come from England bearing a formidable reputation, with the New York Herald calling him the “greatest all-round aviator in the world.” In April 1910 he had raced Louis Paulhan from London to Manchester (a distance of 185 miles) for a newspaper prize of $50,000; Grahame-White had lost, but only after he had become the first man to fly cross-country at night in a desperate attempt to overtake the superior airplane of the Frenchman. “The race, not of the century, but the centuries!” trumpeted New York’s Evening Post, which saluted the Englishman’s gallant flight. Overnight, quite literally, the thirty-one-year-old had become a sensation, the incarnation of the belle epoque, the decade before the outbreak of war in 1914 when gaiety and glamour reigned. From an early age Grahame-White had been fascinated by stories of flying found in the pages of penny dreadfuls,* such as Deadwood Dick’s Electric Coach and The Voyage of the Flying Dutchman. Obsessed with flying, Grahame-White used the family wealth to purchase a hot-air balloon. He went up a few times, usually with a picnic hamper and a pretty girl in tow, but the novelty soon wore off because “it was impossible to go where you wanted as one was compelled to go in the direction in which the wind carried you.”

  Automobiles were more to Grahame-White’s liking, and he became an avid racing driver, striking up a keen friendship with the Honorable Charles Rolls (one of the cofounders of the motorcar company Rolls-Royce). In 1905 Grahame-White opened an automobile showroom in Mayfair, one of London’s most exclusive addresses. He plastered his office walls with the mottoes that would drive him through life: DO IT NOW!, HUSTLE LIKE HELL!, and his favorite: WHEN TRYING ANYTHING, TRY SOMETHING BIG! Soon business was going so well Grahame-White branched out. He bought a speedboat, called Gee Whizz, in which he took the pretty girls for a spin at speeds of 50 mph. Later he invested in a more leisurely vessel, a large yacht, which allowed Grahame-White more time to attend to the needs of his shipmates. He christened the yacht L’Amoureuse, or “love life.”

  However, the arrival in France in 1908 of an American whose character was diametrically opposed to Grahame-White’s changed the Englishman’s life. Wilbur Wright lived almost puritanically. The son of a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, the forty-one-year-old bachelor had never touched a drop of liquor. He didn’t gamble, didn’t womanize, he didn’t even talk that much. His enjoyment came from hard work and aviation.

  In the summer of 1908 Wright had come to France to show skeptics that he and his brother, Orville, had indeed invented the airplane with the first flight at Kitty Hawk, on December 17, 1903. On August 8 he flew for 107 seconds before a spellbound audience. Nothing like it had ever been seen in Europe, and the Wrights were acclaimed as the true inventors of the flying machine. For the next few months Wilbur Wright—the homme-oiseau (birdman), as he was labeled by the French press—gave regular demonstrations at Camp d’Auvours near Le Mans. Grahame-White was in a party of British flying enthusiasts who motored down from London one sunny September day to watch Wright in action. After the flight the group of Englishmen were introduced to the aviator, and Grahame-White was awed by the “ascetic, gaunt American with watchful, hawklike eyes.” It would be the one and only time the two men met on friendly terms, and on the journey back across the Channel Grahame-White thought of nothing else but the Wright invention.

  The following year Grahame-White was one of the half million spectators who attended the Rheims Aviation Meet, the first international event of its kind. While most people were content simply to marvel at the skills of Glenn Curtiss and Louis Blériot, Grahame-White yearned to emulate them. Passing himself off as an official member of the British military delegation that had been invited to Rheims by their French counterparts, Grahame-White gained access to the hangars and buttonholed Blériot. In flawless French he commiserated with Blériot on his failure to win the International Aviation Cup but said how impressed he had been with his eponymous airplane. He would like to buy one and learn to fly. The Frenchman took an instant liking to the intruder, whose self-assurance was more Gallic than Anglo-Saxon. Within a few weeks Grahame-White had installed himself in Blériot’s Parisian factory and was overseeing the construction of his airplane. He christened it the White Ea gle, and by early November it was ready to fly. Unfortunately for Grahame-White, Blériot was out of town at a flying exhibition, so instead of waiting for tuition, he and a friend decided to learn on the job. “It’s a flying machine, isn’t it?” he said to his accomplice. “Then let’s see if it can fly.”

  It did, and the news that Grahame-White had soloed without a single lesson received widespread coverage in the French newspapers with one running the headline UN VOL SENSATIONNEL!When Blériot returned, he gave a rueful shake of his head at the impertinence of the grinning Englishman, but secretly he was deeply impressed. Over the next fortnight the pair flew together often with Blériot demonstrating to his passenger the skills that he had used on his historic flight across the English Channel four months earlier.* Then on November 25 the White Eagle suffered a catastrophic malfunction as they passed over Blériot’s new aerodrome in Pau, southern France, at 60 mph. The rudder control failed as Blériot banked to turn away from trees, and the small biplane flew straight on. Blériot remained unperturbed as he opened the throttle and gained a precious few feet of height, skimming so low over the trees that Grahame-White could have reached down and plucked a leaf from a branch had he not been holding on for dear life.

  Having just cleared the trees, Blériot belly flopped down into a dried-up riverbed, incurring nothing more serious than a few bruises and a damaged ego. It would be the most important flying lesson of Grahame-White’s life, one that added another motto to his collection. “A man who keeps his head can never be injured through a fall,” said Blériot, as
the pair scrambled up the riverbank and began to trudge home toward the aerodrome.

  Grahame-White’s love of flying was only one of his passions. He had two others: money and women. After completing his flying instruction with Blériot, he returned to England and unsuccessfully competed for the London-to-Manchester prize. A fortnight later, with his star in the ascendancy, Grahame-White had hired Frank Marshall to act as his press agent with specific instructions to “circularize the whole of the British and foreign press to give the flights every publicity.” Marshall, however, hadn’t circularized to Grahame-White’s satisfaction, so he fired him and gave the job to Sydney McDonald. When Marshall took his former employer to court for alleged breach of contract (which suit he won), the British press rather looked down their noses at Grahame-White. Were not English gentlemen renowned the world over for their modesty and self-effacement?

  Perhaps, but those two qualities were of little use in the lucrative and competitive business of aviation. Grahame-White had seen the money being offered to those men bold enough to risk their lives chasing records. Blériot was $5,000 better off after his Channel flight, Curtiss’s victory in the 1909 International Aviation Cup race had enriched him by a similar amount, and now Paulhan had pocketed the big one, $50,000 for being first to Manchester.