Chasing Icarus (2 page)
Authors: Gavin Mortimer
Saturday, October 15, 1910
Walter Wellman was woken by a knock on his door at four A.M. The fifty-two-year-old Ohioan groped for his spectacles, fitted them to his sleepy face, and padded across the floor. Standing outside the door was the night manager of the Chalfonte Hotel in Atlantic City, who apologized for the intrusion, then relayed a message he had just received over the telephone. Melvin Vaniman had requested Mr. Wellman’s immediate presence at the balloon house. Conditions were favorable. The news was like a splash of cold water to Wellman’s face, and a few minutes later he was in his khaki flying suit busily instructing the night manager to telephone the city’s fire and police departments.
Once that was done, he took an automobile to the balloon house, arriving just as the eastern sky began to be illuminated by the first streaks of dawn and the hogsheads of fog drifting toward the shore at the head of a southeast breeze became visible. Vaniman, a failed opera singer who was the airship’s second-in-command, briefed Wellman on the latest telegrams from the weather bureau in Washington and assured his captain that the hurricane ravaging Cuba was too far south to affect them. In his opinion, and that of the weather bureau, they were good to go. But still Wellman hesitated as he stood in front of the balloon house gazing out to sea. His voyage to reach the north pole in a dirigible the previous year had ended in humiliation, and he couldn’t bear the thought of more public ridicule. “Perhaps we’ll make a trial flight first,” murmured Well-man. Vaniman’s patience snapped: “Not much you won’t! There will be nothing doing right now but the trip all the way across. We’ve delayed too long already and the weather is too good to miss now. It’s Europe or bust.”
Wellman regarded his chief engineer in silence. Those newspaper reports were never far from his thoughts, the ones that accused him of being a phony and a fool, deriding his talk of crossing the Atlantic in an airship as nothing more than “hot air” (and how they loved the pun). “Okay,” said Wellman eventually. “Let’s go.”
A little before seven A.M. the canvas doors of the balloon house were pulled back by Wellman and his five crew members, and two hundred police officers and firefighters flooded inside. They knew the drill. Quickly they surrounded dozens of tightly packed steel drums of gasoline, all strapped together to form a thirty-three-foot-long rectangle, and lifted it onto their shoulders. It was heavy, over two tons, and the men’s legs ached under its weight as they shuffled slowly toward the water’s edge. Wellman and his crew called it the airship’s “equilibrator,” but that was plain gobbledygook to everyone else, who called it the ballast.
The equilibrator was an ingenious contraption constructed by Well-man and Vaniman. At the end of the gasoline drums was a series of forty heavy wooden blocks, each twenty inches in length, which would compensate for the gradual diminution in the equilibrator’s weight as gasoline drums were hauled up and poured into the tank in the floor of the passenger car. Under normal conditions it was hoped the
America
would sail at a height of two hundred feet with the lower end of the equilibrator trailing in the water. Then, when the gas expanded and raised the airship, the weight of the equilibrator increased. When the gas contracted, on the other hand, more of the equilibrator would rest on the water. That was the theory, at least, but it had yet to be put into practice because there hadn’t been time to try out the equilibrator.
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 before 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.