It was to be the world’s first international air race, and financed entirely by France’s champagne industry. Its official title was “La Grande Semaine d’Aviation de la Champagne,” and among the French aviation stars to take part were Henri Farman, Louis Blériot, Léon Delagrange, two of Wilbur Wright’s protégés, Charles de Lambert and Paul Tissandier (flying French-built Wright planes), as well as the American Glenn Curtiss, who had been chosen to participate by the American Aero Club when the Wright brothers declined.
At age thirty-one, Curtiss was a lean, shy, intensely serious competitor who, like the Wrights, had started out as a bicycle mechanic in his hometown of Hammondsport, New York, then began building and racing motorcycles. (He became the first acclaimed American motorcycle champion, “the fastest man in the world,” achieving speeds on his motorcycle as high as 130 miles an hour.)
His interest in aviation had begun when a balloonist named Tom Baldwin asked him to build a lightweight motor for a dirigible. Once, in September 1906, while in Dayton, Baldwin and Curtiss had visited Wilbur and Orville at their shop. Baldwin had thought Curtiss asked the brothers far too many questions, but, as he later said, they “had the frankness of schoolboys.” The year after, Curtiss met Alexander Graham Bell, who made him “Director of Experiments” for the Aerial Experiment Association.
In 1909, with a wealthy aviation enthusiast who had worked with Octave Chanute and Samuel Langley, Augustus Herring, Curtiss formed the Herring-Curtiss Company to build flying machines. Those they built relied on movable flaps on the wings—ailerons, “little wings”—instead of wing warping, to control rolling and banking. The idea had occurred earlier to a young French engineer, Robert Esnault-Pelterie, and had been tried by Santos-Dumont, Blériot, and others. Alexander Graham Bell, too, had become interested, but whether on his own or having heard about Esnault-Pelterie, is not clear. Also, it had already been described for all to see by the Wrights as an alternative to wing warping in their patent published in 1906.
But for Curtiss at Reims, speed would be the point and the small, new biplane he would fly had been built strictly for that, with a powerful, lightweight engine.
Anyone wanting proof of the pace of change in the new century had only to consider that just one year before, in August 1908, at Le Mans, all the excitement had been about one man only, Wilbur Wright, flying one airplane before about 150 people to start with. This August at Reims, a total of twenty-two pilots would take off in as many planes, before colossal grandstands accommodating fifty thousand people.
The grand opening took place Sunday, August 22, and by then Orville and Katharine had once more sailed for Europe, heading this time for Berlin, the brothers having concluded that demonstrations there were a necessity. Orville, as a result of his “blaze of glory,” was the one in most demand. Wilbur remained in Dayton, concentrating on motors with Charlie Taylor, and seeing to business of the kind he most disliked, including the commencement, in mid-August, of a lawsuit against the Herring-Curtiss Company for violation of Wright patents.
Events at Reims created an even greater sensation than promised. By the last days the crowds numbered 200,000, four times the capacity of the grandstands. The contestants flew higher, farther, and faster than anyone ever had, breaking every record set by the Wright brothers in the past year, and the biggest winner, the most celebrated of the contestants, was Glenn Curtiss, who won the prize for speed.
Nor was the excitement limited to France and the rest of Europe, as was clear from the American press. “The great meeting at Reims has been an electrifying, delirious success” (New York Sun); “The scoffers scoff no longer” (Washington Herald); “The aviation tournament is only a hint of what the future will soon witness when the sky shall become the common highway” (Cincinnati Times-Star); “This week at Reims marks a new epoch and one of the most ambitious phases of human history” (Atlanta Constitution).
Overnight Curtiss was the new American hero. But only a week later crowds as large as 200,000 turned out at Tempelhof Field in Berlin to see Orville fly, and in the course of his demonstration flights over the next several days, Orville, accompanied by a student pilot, flew for an hour and 35 minutes, a new world’s record for a flight with a passenger. And at the same time Wilbur had signed on to make his first-ever public flight in the United States, in New York. It was to be part of a celebration commemorating the three-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s ascent of the Hudson River and the hundredth anniversary of Robert Fulton’s first steamboat on the Hudson. Wilbur was to be paid $15,000. Glenn Curtiss, too, was to participate in the event.