Enduring Heritage

The many contributions of aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss receive top billing in an upstate New York museum.

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By C.V. Glines

One of aviation’s meccas is Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, site of the first successful powered, fixed-wing flights by the Wright brothers. And then there is Hammondsport, N.Y., where Glenn Curtiss, another of America’s aviation trailblazers, experimented. Interesting and well-kept museums are found at both locations. Increased public interest in Curtiss and his contributions to aviation have led to a new museum in Curtiss’ hometown that is growing rapidly in popularity.

The Wright brothers made bicycles. So did Glenn Hammond Curtiss, their chief competitor, who was born in Hammondsport, at the southern tip of Keuka Lake, on May 21, 1878. His first name is derived from “the Glen,” a picturesque cleft in the hills north of the village that his mother enjoyed very much; she added an n, probably to make the name more masculine. His middle name came from town founder Lazarus Hammond.

The Wrights continued in the bike business in Dayton, Ohio, while experimenting with their planes, but Curtiss started manufacturing motorcycles. The taciturn, unsmiling Curtiss was called “the fastest man on earth” when he was clocked at 136.6 mph during a motorcycle race at Ormond Beach, Fla., in 1904. Curtiss’ entrance into flying began that same year when Thomas Scott Baldwin, famous lighter-than-air devotee, asked Curtiss to make him a two-cylinder, air-cooled engine to power his airship. The first plane Curtiss had anything to do with was Red Wing, which Casey Baldwin lofted from the ice at Keuka Lake on March 12, 1908, before a small crowd. The flight was hailed by the local press as “the first public flight by an airplane in the United States.” The Wrights contended this was untrue, as they had been flying in plain view from a field beside the trolley line linking Dayton and Springfield, Ohio, since 1904. This statement was the beginning of a feud and eventual litigation between the Wrights and Curtiss.

That the Wrights made the first powered flights has generally been accepted, but the achievements of Curtiss spanned several decades and took the airplane from its wood, fabric and wire beginnings to the forerunners of modern transport aircraft. The new museum documents his life and unique accomplishments.

Curtiss made his first flight on his 30th birthday–May 21, 1908–in White Wing, a design of the Aerial Experiment Association, a group led by Alexander Graham Bell. White Wing was the first plane in America to be controlled by ailerons instead of the wing-warping used by the Wrights. It was also the first plane on wheels this side of the Atlantic.

The first plane Curtiss built and flew was June Bug. In 1908, Curtiss won the first leg of the three-legged Scientific American magazine competition for being first to fly in a straight line for more than a kilometer. He won the next leg of the competition in 1909, for establishing a distance record. He then won the Gordon Bennett Trophy, plus the $5,000 prize, in the world’s first international air meet at Reims, France, in 1909. When the New York World newspaper offered $10,000 for the first successful flight between Albany and New York City, Curtiss won the prize money and nationwide recognition. He also won the third leg of the competition and permanent possession of the Scientific American trophy in 1910.

One of the major contributions to flight progress during this period was the invention of ailerons, which was the basis for the litigious rift between the Wrights and Curtiss. But Curtiss had more significant “firsts.” He deserves credit for pioneering the design of the floatplane and the flying boat. It was a Curtiss plane flown by Eugene Ely, a company exhibition pilot, that made the first successful takeoff from a Navy ship in 1910. Another Curtiss plane, the NC-4, made the first crossing of the Atlantic in 1919. Curtiss built the first U.S. Navy aircraft, called the Triad, and also trained the first two naval pilots. He received the Collier Trophy and the Aero Club Gold Medal for the greatest accomplishment in aviation during 1911.

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