Modern military aviation officially began in the United States on August 2,1909 when the Aeronautical Division of the U.S. Army Signal Corps took delivery of a Wright Model A. The aircraft was handed over at Fort Myer, Virginia, for $30,000 and was the first conventional winged aircraft ever sold for military use.

The U.S. Army had earlier told Orville and Wilbur Wright that it would not even begin formulating a requirement for a "flying machine" until one was designed that could fly horizontally and carry "an operator."

Flying caught on quickly and the Wright brothers soon found themselves faced with several competitors. Their most significant rival, however, was a young Glenn Hammond Curtiss.

Following their historic flight in December 1903, the Wright brothers continued in the bike business in Dayton, Ohio, while experimenting with their planes. Curtiss was also a bicycle mechanic, but soon started manufacturing motorcycles forming his own company in 1902. 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 in 1904 when Thomas Scott Baldwin, a famous lighter-than-air devotee, asked Curtiss to make him a two cylinder, aircooled engine to power his airship.

Two years later, Glenn joined the Aerial Experiment Association (A.E.A.), a group of aviation enthusiasts led by Alexander Graham Bell. 

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 Wright brothers 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.

Curtiss made his first flight on his 30th birthday, May 21, 1908, in "White Wing," a design of the A.E.A.  The White Wing was the first plane in America to be controlled by ailerons instead of the wingwarping then in use by the Wright brothers. It was also the first plane on wheels this side of the Atlantic.

The invention of the aileron was one of the major contributions to flight progress during this period, which was to become the basis for the litigious rift between the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss.

Later that year, Curtiss achieved the world's first ever one kilometer flight (a distance of more than one mile) in his own aeroplane the "June Bug."

The following year, he was the lone American entrant at the First International Aviation Meet at Rheims, France, in August 1909. Glenn Curtiss won world-wide fame by winning the Gordon Bennett Cup Race and the Prix de la Vitesse at this event, achieving the greatest reputation as an aviator on the European Continent. During this Air Meet, on August 28, reached a speed of 46.5 m.p.h.

Still, within the span of six months, Curtiss beat his own record with a speed of 55 m.p.h. while carrying a passenger.  This one accomplishment was part of an event held January 10-20, 1910, destined to change aviation history forever --America's First International Air Meet, held at Los Angeles, California.

Except for the Wright brothers, who refused to participate in the meet, there was gathered at Dominguez what was probably the most representative collection of aviators in America at that time. Flying machines of all sorts, including biplanes, triplanes, and monoplanes appeared from all over the country. Various experimental models such as the multiplane, aerofoil, and ornithopter were also on hand. Not to mention balloons and dirigibles of every make and their pilots.

But America's leading representative at the Los Angeles-Dominguez International Air Meet was clearly Glenn Hammond Curtiss.

Glenn Hammond Curtiss

Glenn H. Curtiss

(c) Copyright 1996

All Rights Reserved

Mark J. Denger

California Center for Military History

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