The Wright Company: From Invention to Industry

5. World Records for Wright Aviators: The Exhibition Department

Introduction 71 5 World Records for Wright Aviators The Exhibition Department The Wright Company did not want its only appearances in the press and in the public imagination to be connected with its lawsuits. It hoped to attract positive press coverage (and drive sales) with its exhibition department, and so it hired young, daring, if not foolhardy men as company pilots to demonstrate the capabilities of Wright Company airplanes before the public at fairs and other events. It used the department’s performances as advertising , both for aviation in general and for the Wright Company specifically. In 1910 and 1911 the exhibition department was also the largest single consumer of The Wright Company: From Invention to Industry 72 Wright Company airplanes. The exhibition aviators were the traveling public face of the company (the Wright brothers themselves rarely accompanied them totheirperformances),onegreatlyvaluedbycompanydirectors.AlpheusBarnes wrote Andrew Freedman in early 1911 in support of bonuses for the pilots:“The reputation they made for the Wright machine during the past year I consider a valuable asset which more than offsets the amount appropriated.” The department grew from a realization by the Wrights—who disliked the showy and dangerous flying common to the aviators—that,in addition to sales,fees for exhibition performances were one of the best sources of income for the company.1 To the editors of the Cameron County Press, in rural Emporium, Pennsylvania , exhibition aviators foretold the aeronautical future:“bringing flight into the place of first importance.” And there were many daredevils flying those early airplanes.The Wright Company’s pilots were part of a crowded community of aviators who performed for the public. Capitalizing on the novelty of the new technology, pilots—mostly young, white men, though several women gained fame as pilots—flew airplanes built by all the major manufacturers of the day at provincial, state, and county fairs and public commemorations and competed for money and trophies endowed by prominent aviation financiers such as Wright Company investor Robert Collier (whose Aero Club of America Trophy, first awarded in 1911 to Glenn Curtiss and renamed the Collier Trophy in 1922, remains a prize for which modern aviators compete). While some aviators flew independently,unconnected with a company,during the first half of the 1910s most exhibition pilots were employees of an airplane builder, demonstrating their company’s airplanes to audiences from Manitoba to Miami. The Curtiss Company employed such prominent aviators as Lincoln Beachey, Charles Hamilton, and Blanche Stuart Scott, the first woman to fly an airplane by herself; Curtiss himself also occasionally flew. Siblings Alfred, John, and Matilde Moisant flew both Blériot and Moisant airplanes; their stable of aviators included Harriet Quimby, the first woman licensed as a pilot in the United States. While exhibition aviation garnered its sponsors significant financial rewards, it proved quite dangerous to its practitioners, with pilot (and sometimes passenger) deaths from crashes or from losing consciousness at high altitude and falling from out-of-control airplanes without seat belts chillingly common.2 The Wrights did not want to personally manage exhibition aviators, and they found it easier to hold to this goal than their initial goal of not personally interfering in the overall management of the company. Even before the company’s formation, they received offers from other businessmen, including The Exhibition Department 73 engineer,Toledo Mud Hens owner,and airship promoter Charles J.Strobel of Toledo,to arrange and supervise the crowd-pleasing shows for which the exhibition pilots became famous. During the summer of 1909, the brothers wrote to one of Strobel’s former aviators, the well-known airship builder and pilot Augustus Roy Knabenshue (1875–1960):“We are not thinking of connecting ourselves directly with the exhibition end of the business, but in return for an order for a number of machines we would agree to assign you . . . exclusive rights to give exhibitions . . . during the years 1909 and 1910.” Originally from Lancaster, in central Ohio, Knabenshue was the son of Salome and Samuel Knabenshue. His father, a former school superintendent and editor of the Toledo Blade, had joined the U.S. diplomatic corps in 1905 as consul in Belfast , Ireland; while their son was gaining fame in aviation, Salome and Samuel Knabenshue were in the process of moving to a new diplomatic post inTianjin (Tientsin), China, where Samuel served as consul general until 1914. Another Knabenshue son, Paul, would make a career in the foreign service, sheltering...