Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (7 page)

BOOK: Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men
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Exactly! And yet to this point, the British government had done nothing to get possession of that power. Lord Northcliffe’s view was that once a plane flew across the Channel, the government would realise that Britain’s much vaunted navy was now superseded as a military force, and would begin to pour resources into ensuring the nation was at the forefront of this new, overpowering weapon of war.

William Kingsford Smith had tried. He had really tried.

After the disaster of the defaulted bank loan, which had destroyed his banking career, he had been glad to make a fresh start in Canada, and now, after a couple of years working as a humble clerk, he had decided to try his hand at business once again. With his brother-in-law Arthur Kingsford and his oldest son, Harold—who had now married a Canadian girl, Elsie, with whom he had two children in quick succession—he had decided to begin a real estate business. Vancouver was growing, money was flowing in, and it stood to reason that there would be many opportunities to make money if they did it right. But somehow it just didn’t work. Maybe it was because for something so personal as the buying or selling of a home, Canadians preferred dealing with their own, or maybe it was because they were entering into a business of which they had absolutely no first-hand knowledge…but one way or another the venture failed. In the end, after nearly six years in Canada there was nothing to do but sell up and head home. While the Canadian experience had been physically invigorating, it had been financially debilitating. And at least Australia was warm. In ones and twos, then, the Kingsford Smiths began to head back across the Pacific throughout the last half of 1908, until William, Catherine and young Chilla were the last to leave in January 1909.

William found work sorting mail at the Neutral Bay post office, on Sydney’s lower North Shore, and the Kingsford Smiths now based themselves in a modest rented home in that suburb, at 68 Yeo Street.

Scribbling again.

Ever since her husband Louis Blériot had seen Monsieur Wilbur Wright fly, his wife Alicia had been driven
mad
by his constant distraction, up to and including his endless scribbling of plans and drawings on the tablecloth while she was trying to feed him and their five children dinner!
48
The children would finish dinner and ask to be excused, and her Louis would still be sitting there, jotting down notes, working out sums, and frequently he would have entirely forgotten to eat! More often than not, Alicia—mightily annoyed, much as she loved him—cleaned up and left him to it. He talked about nothing else, thought about nothing else, did nothing else but continue to build his plane in his workshop with the help of another designer, by the name of Raymond Saulnier, incorporating all the best features of the Wright
Flyer
he had seen at Hunaudières racetrack.

For this plane owed no little inspiration to what Louis had closely observed on that wonderful day he’d seen Wilbur Wright take to the air, including wing warping, which the Frenchman recognised would give him greater control. Louis’ great departure, however, was to embrace the concept of a
monoplane
, a plane with just one set of wings, which he was convinced would give him greater speed and less drag. In fact, it was something he had been working on even before he’d seen Wilbur Wright fly, and had even built some monoplanes with mixed success—read disastrous and just passable—but
Flyer III
had given him the clue as to how to make it really work.

This plane, he decided, would be built of oak and poplar wood, with its cockpit and flying surfaces covered with canvas, save for the uncovered rear fuselage. It incorporated the Wright’s wing-warping system, and also had a steel tube tower above the cockpit to provide a firm anchor for the flying wires needed to support the monoplane’s 25-foot 4-inch wings. A matching frame underneath the cockpit gave a handy attachment for wires to resist the lifting forces. The main undercarriage consisted of two bicycle wheels which were free to swivel, with another bicycle wheel supporting the tail.

For propulsion, Louis decided, after experimentation, to give it a 25-horsepower Anzani 3-watt cylinder radial engine, with a 6-foot 10-inch twin-bladed wooden Chauvière Intégrale propeller, turning at 1200 revolutions per minute. And, just as he had done in his recent designs, he put that engine with the propeller right at the
front
of the plane, not too far from the wings, while he put the elevator and rudder well back at the end of the tail. Oh, and one more thing,
ma chèrie.
Developing a system he had tried in previous incarnations of this plane, he would link the control to the wing warping and elevator to one central
manette
, a joystick, while he would control the rudder of the plane by a bar at his feet. If he wanted to go up, he pulled the joystick back. If he wanted to go down, he would push the joystick forward. So elegant. So simple. If he pressed the right rudder while banking, it would turn right, and if the left rudder, it turned left. Louis, as he never tired of telling Alicia, was absolutely
sure
that this would be his best plane yet…

One man in Australia who had come to the same conclusion as Lord Northcliffe about the potentially huge military significance of aeroplanes was an engineering disciple of Lawrence Hargrave, an intense fellow by the name of George Augustine Taylor. He had variously worked as a builder, journalist and cartoonist; had been a leader in Sydney’s literary set and bohemian movement; was a successful businessman and nationalist; and was now possessed by two passions—how important both aviation and wireless communications would be to the future of Australia.

Convinced that Australia would soon no longer be isolated, and therefore safe, from the rest of the world, Taylor was determined that the Australian government should be prepared. With that in mind, on the late afternoon of 28 April 1909, he met other leading figures—including Lawrence Hargrave—to discuss the formation of the Aerial League of Australia in Sydney.

This meeting was held at the salubrious Hotel Australia, on Castlereagh Street in downtown Sydney. While other men caroused downstairs discussing such banalities as cricket and football, matters of great moment were being discussed upstairs. Taylor himself began, opining that the conquest of the air changed entirely Australia’s position in the world. Not for much longer, surely, could the nation depend on the all-powerful British naval fleet for its protection, when that fleet could so soon be flown over. There were also many commercial considerations, as the advent of the aircraft would likely change entirely the way nations interacted with each other commercially. Both ways, it was important that Australia be at the forefront of this aerial revolution, and the Aerial League of Australia would devote itself to that end. He then moved a motion to that effect!

Hear,
hear
! Hear,
hear
!
49

The motion was seconded by one Major Charles Rosenthal, who noted that while it had long been difficult for Australia’s enemies to get battleships to such distant climes, the same could not long be said of flying enemy planes here, and it was urgent that Australia get prepared.

Hear,
hear
! Hear,
hear
!
50

By meeting’s end it was done and the Aerial League was formed, immediately receiving much positive comment from the press and public alike. ‘While the utility of the airship or aeroplane is little understood,’ the Sydney
Daily Telegraph
noted the following day, ‘its possibilities appeal strongly to the imagination. One scientist avers that a voyage to the moon would be possible, could we once “get a kick on the ether”.’

It went on, ‘The development of the aerial ship, in warfare, may yet mean much to Australia, and the new league begins a useful and patriotic work…’
51

Two
DISTANCE

What we early designers did we did under the stress of necessity, that ancient mother of invention. We were not university trained. Rule of thumb inventors taught in the school of experience, we used our necks as measuring sticks of success.

A
NTHONY
F
OKKER
1

There was a young man of Mark Lane

Who constructed an aeroplane,

It flew, so we heard,

Like a beautiful bird,

His tombstone is pretty but plain.

P
OPULAR LIMERICK AMONG THE
E
NGLISH PUBLIC IN THE EARLY
1900
S
2

[The first seafarers] had it easier. They could practice first in pools, then in ponds, then in streams, and not venture out to sea until much later. For this man there is only the sea.

F
RANZ
K
AFKA DESCRIBING HIS FIRST VIEW OF
L
OUIS
B
LÉRIOT FLYING AT
B
RESCIA
3

I
n Europe, things moved quickly in the aviation world from the moment that word of Lord Northcliffe’s prize for crossing the Channel got out. There had already been several failed attempts before the 37-year-old Louis Blériot decided that he and his plane were ready. For years he had been fascinated by the concept of powered flight and had poured all his resources into building planes of his own design. The key feature of this latest wood and canvas monoplane, the
Blériot XI
, he called it rather grandly, was that it was the first one he had built that hadn’t actually—
comment ça se dit?
—crashed. As a matter of fact, Blériot had crashed so often in so many different planes that he had developed a theory that his survival had all to do with ‘the elasticity of the aeroplane’.

‘What happens when an aeroplane strikes the ground,’ he had written in 1907, with surely more authority than any pilot in the world, ‘is this: first some wooden rod or strut breaks, and then another, until half the machine has been either crushed or beaten in. The breaking of these parts, one after the other, absorbs the shock of the impact with the ground. One feels…as though…the machine was telescoping upon itself.’
4
As to how one must comport oneself in a crash, he was equally clear: ‘One must not try to save both the machine and oneself. I always throw myself upon one of the wings of my machine, when I have a mishap, and although this breaks the wing, it causes me to alight safely.’
5

Blériot also had a very relaxed attitude to injuries sustained while flying, never allowing them to interfere with getting back into the air. At the present, for example, he was unable to walk without crutches because of a deep burn he had sustained to his left ankle when it had been pressed hard up against an exhaust manifold while he had been flying the previous week. Never mind. Maybe he really would get over
La Manche
and win the prize offered by Lord Northcliffe. True, that morning when he had been awoken at 2.30 am to be told the weather across the Channel was clearing and he could make an attempt at dawn when the wind would be calmest, he had received the news in his own cloud of blackness, all but certain that he was now on the edge of yet another heroic failure, and perhaps this time a catastrophic one. There would be no throwing himself on the wing this time, not if he hit the water. There would be no point. In that pre-dawn darkness, jostled awake to be told his hour was now, he had wished that the weather would turn bad again, so that he wouldn’t have to go, but could stay there, snuggling into his wife Alicia.

But then he felt better! Stronger. Maybe, just maybe his
jour de gloire
had indeed arrived.

And now, as the dawn of Sunday morning 25 July 1909 broke over Les Baraques just west of Calais—not far from the abandoned late nineteenth century workings of the Channel Tunnel project—and he breathed in the fresh air, he even felt strangely confident, the more so after he made a quick test flight to ensure that all was in order. At his take-off for that trial flight the spectators had wildly applauded and cheered. The fuel tanks were topped up again and all was in readiness, as the crowd of hundreds of villagers, awoken by the stunning noise overhead as Blériot did his test flight, pressed close,
pulsing
with excitement.
6

Without further ado, Blériot’s manager and great friend, Alfred Leblanc, started the 25-horsepower engine of his frail-looking mechanical dragonfly. The plane, still caked in mud from its last flight and looking very weatherbeaten, instantly came to life and now the intrepid pilot, dressed in the ubiquitous blue overalls of the French workman, replete with oil stains, adjusted his goggles and did up his top button. Blériot had just one last question for Leblanc, and he shouted it over the sound of the engine, even as the
Daily Mail
’s aviation correspondent, Harry Harper, faithfully recorded it in his notebook.


Au fait
,
ou
est-ce
exactement
,
Douvres?

7
(By the way, where exactly
is
Dover?)

The insouciant Leblanc pointed rather vaguely over the misty waters in a more or less north-westerly direction, and with that Blériot gave the order: ‘
Laissez aller!
’ (Let ‘er rip!)

BOOK: Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men
6.76Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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