Free Unlocking the Sky by Seth Shulman

continue nonetheless, with orders for Curtiss airplanes and so-called flying boats—the single-hulled seaplanes that Curtiss had invented—arriving from as far away as India, Russia, and Japan. At home, flying boats will increasingly draw the attention of well-heeled executives. Henry Ford makes the pilgrimage to Hammondsport to marvel at Curtiss’s latest invention. Harold F. McCormick, vice president of the International Harvester Corporation, comes to purchase a flying boat on the spot. He says he wants to use it for the commute from his Lake Michigan estate to his office in Chicago. And activity at Curtiss’s flying school will boom as never before with eager new pilots venturing out each day, weather permitting, to practice over Hammondsport’s Lake Keuka.
    As Zahm steps from the train, Curtiss spots him at once andapproaches to greet him warmly. But there is, on both sides of their formal handshake, a mixture of admiration and apprehension. No amount of cordiality can overshadow the dramatic differences between them. Curtiss has spent his whole career learning by doing. He has had no formal schooling in aeronautics and does not easily translate his remarkable grasp of aviation principles into words. Zahm, a distinguished professor of aeronautics, has written the field’s most widely read text. Yet Zahm has had remarkably little firsthand experience with aircraft.
    The two men differ in temperament as well as training. Curtiss is intuitive and spontaneous; Zahm is formal and methodical. And, of greater significance to the restoration, Curtiss, swamped with the demands of a burgeoning business, has thought little about the fine-grained details of the restoration project; Zahm has, for more than a month, thought of little else.
    Bridging this divide is not easy. But after a formal, even awkward, exchange upon Zahm’s arrival, he and Curtiss will build an enduring friendship. In addition to their mutual love of aviation, the fact is that each comes to hold the complementary talents of the other in particularly high regard. Zahm writes much later that, from the first, he marvels at Curtiss’s natural way with his associates and workers, calling it a gift that manages somehow to inspire their most “enthusiastic efforts.”
    The buttoned-up Zahm marvels too at Curtiss’s unnervingly casual manner about his dog Terence—who Zahm describes as “a Scotch roustabout.” Beloved throughout Hammondsport, Terence enjoys the free run of town and has no greater joy than jumping excitedly into Curtiss’s automobile or those of the local champagne merchants to go for a ride.
    In the months to come, Zahm will help guide Curtiss through areconstruction effort that could well alter aviation history. For his part, Curtiss will draw Zahm out of the ivory tower and fully into the tumultuous, emerging aviation business. That summer, with Curtiss’s encouragement, Zahm will even become a pilot. After his first outing with Curtiss’s lead flight instructor Francis Wildman, Zahm calls it a thrill to “couple the practical with the theoretical” after studying the mechanics of flight for so many years.
     
    The morning after Zahm’s arrival, most likely over breakfast at Curtiss’s home, the two begin to hammer out the particulars of the aerodrome restoration.
    When Charles Walcott, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, first formally broached the possibility of restoring Langley’s aerodrome, Curtiss promptly sought the opinion of Alexander Graham Bell. “I should like to know what you think of this plan,” Curtiss wrote to Bell in February, “as it would be an easy thing to do provided it is worthwhile.”
    But while Bell and others agreed the project had merit, Curtiss is now coming to realize that the task—fraught as it is with serious historical weight—will not prove so easy after all. As he listens to Zahm’s detailed concerns, Curtiss confronts the tangled complexities involved in trying to remain