AIR HEADS Part Ten

I wonder how many people worked in the advertising department at the Cole Motor Company in  1911?  They only built 860 luxury cars that year. But then J. J.  Cole had always been more interested in sales than in engineering. 

Besides supporting Bob Fowler’s “Cole Flyer” transcontinental flight that year, the Indianapolis based company also had a squadron of racing cars which toured the country, and a big balloon that made appearances at county fairs. "Joe" Cole even invested in the founding of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.  As their company slogan went, “There’s a Touch of Tomorrow in All Cole Does Today”. Well, maybe. But the touch was not to last forever. 

Joseph Jarrett Cole had built a fortune in horse buggies before he borrowed enough cash from Harvey Firestone to start his auto company in 1909. He believed in the "Standardized Car" principle.  

The Cole plant built nothing, but rather assembled what J.J. considered the best parts from other manufacturers and put them together in the Cole building. “A man’s car any woman can drive.”

In 1911 Joe used an "L" head 4 cylander engine from the Northway Engine Works in Detroit.  And his cars featured such innovations as balloon tires, “adjustable door glasses” (i.e., removable windows),  a 15 foot long dashboard light and a speedometer that read up to 75 mph; unfortunately the Norway engine only produced 30 horse power, and flat out the Cole Model 30 and model 40's  could only reach 45 mph.  Bigwigs at General Motors wanted to buy out Cole, and when Joe wouldn’t sell they just bought up his suppliers - including Northway -  and gradually cut him off. 

With the post war recession of 1920-21 Joe realized the jig was up and began a careful liquidation of his company.  Ten months later, on 7 August, 1925, at the age of 56, he unexpectedly died of a heart attack.   His family kept the name on The Cole Building  and rented it out  into the 1970’s. Thus fared the man who sponsored Bob Fowler's flight. 

After he finally reached El Paso in 1911, it took Bob Fowler(above, right) a month just to escape Texas. But he made a lot of money there. On Christmas Eve he  crash landed in a rice field outside of Seixas, Louisiana.   Having lost the race to Rodgers, and prefeering to spend the winter in warmer climes, Bob took a couple of days to film floods in the east Texas and southern Louisiana carry. He carried a cameraman aloft (above) and made movie history.  He landed in New Orleans at about 3 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. 

It took Bob Fowler until February of 1912 to reach Florida. He landed on the sand at Jacksonville Beach on 12 February 1912 -  becoming the second man to cross the nation by airplane. Not that very many people noticed. 

Bob would later observe with understatement, “I was the first to start and the last to finish.” It had taken him 116 days and 72 hours of actual flight time to cover the 2,800 miles across America. The very next year Bob Fowler made the first non-stop transcontinental flight – and the shortest. Just 36 miles across the Isthmus of Panama. 

He filmed it, of course. Bob Fowler was a pretty crafty fellow. Except he was immediately arrested. The defense department wanted him charged with espionage, for filming the Panama Canal. But eventually cooler heads prevailed.

Bob sold The “Cole Flyer” in 1912, and after being used in the movie business for a few years, it was sold again, this time for scrap wood. The engine was the only part saved, But after his flight Bob traded the Cole 4 engine for a new model Wright engine, and that is still on display at the Exposition Museum in Los Angles. So nothing remains of the Cole Flyer.

In 1916 Bob started the “Fowler Airplane Corporation” in his home town of San Francisco. He modified and sold 125 Curtis JN-4’s (“Jennys”) to the U.S. Army as trainers, and after WWI he started Bluebird Airways, a passenger service around the bay area. He retired to San Jose and died in 1966, at the healthy old age of 82.

Jimmy Ward (above), the ex-jockey who had the good sense to drop out of the Hearst race, suffered a great tragedy.  His wife Maude Mae died in a hotel fire,  and Jimmy was so devastated he lost his mind and never got it back.  Eventually Glenn Curtiss helped him get admitted to a Florida mental hospital. He died there in 1923, at the age of 37.  He was buried in an unmarked paupers grave. Some of his fellow aviation pioneers collected money to give him a more respectful funeral, but I can find no record of that ever happening.

The confident Cal Rodgers was testing a new airplane on Wednesday  3 April, 1912, just off shore of Long Beach, California, when he ran into a flock of sea gulls. The plane banked sharply 45 degrees and slid into the surf,.

Cal had crashed just feet from where he had posed grinning in the surf with the “Vin Fiz” the previous December.

The engine broke loose from its mounts and crushed Cal, breaking his neck. He was still breathing when swimmers pulled him from the water, but he died soon after. Cal Rodgers was the 127th pilot's death since the Wright Brothers flight in 1903, and the 22nd American aviator killed. Considering the number of people flying in 1912, those were still terrible odds.

Cal's mother, Maria (Rodgers) Sweitzer, took procession of her son’s body and had it shipped back to Pittsburgh. There Calbraith Perry Rodgers was buried in Allegheny Cemetery under an elaborate tombstone (above), marked with the words “I Endure, I Conquer.”

Cal’s brother John took procession of the “Vin Fiz Flyer” and had it shipped back to Ohio, to the Wright Brother's shops, to be repaired. He offered the Flyer to the Smithsonian, but they already had a Wright B, so instead, in 1917, the Flyer was donated to the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. In 1934 the Smithsonian changed their minds and bought the “Vin Fiz Flyer”.  Refurbished and rebuilt, that is the plane that hangs from the ceiling in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

And little Maude was determined to endure and conquer as well. After lengthy court battles with her ex-mother-in-law in California, Maude was awarded legal possession of the “Vin Fiz Flyer”. How could this be? Wasn’t the Flyer back in Ohio, being rebuilt? It was. But the contents of the “Vin Fiz Special” hanger car contained enough spare parts, many of which had actually flown sections of the transcontinental  odyssey, to construct a second “Vin Fiz Flyer” and still claim it as the “original.”

Two years after Cal’s death, Maude married Charlie “Wiggie” Wiggin, who had shown such faith and devotion to her Cal; two lonely souls who shared an adoration of another man. “Wiggie”, had, by this time, acquired his own pilot’s license. And Maude and Wiggie made a living for a few years barnstorming their “Vin Fiz Flyer” around the country. And then they quietly faded out of history.

It would be ten years later when U.S. Army Air Force pilot Jimmy Doolittle (above) would cross the continent in less than a day - 21 hours 19 minutes, with just one stop for fuel

And as you sit in your tiny passenger seat, crammed four to an aisle, held prisoner on the tarmac for endless hours, forced to use a toilet designed for a diminutive Marquise de Sade, charged extra for a micro-waved “snack”, a pillow, a blanket, a soda or a thimble full of peanuts, even the privilege of using the rest room...

...consider the sacrifices of those who suffered before you; landing in chicken coops, landing in tree tops, landing in barbed wire fences, landing in Texas for day after day. And remember the immortal words of Cal Rodgers; “I am not in this business because I like it, but because of what I can make out of it.” It has become the mantra of every airline passenger world wide.

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AIR HEADS Chapter Nine

 

I guess you could say that Charlie Taylor (above) was the first member of the “Final Destination Club”. On 17 September, 1908,  Charlie was about to take his first flight with Orville Wright when an Army Officer asked if he could go next. It was in Charlie’s character to defer to the request and he gave up his seat.

So U.S. Army Lt. Thomas Selfridge (above, foreground) was the passenger when, at an altitude of 125 feet, a propeller blade broke, throwing the aircraft, nose first,  into the ground.   

Charlie was one of the first to reach the crash site, and freed Orville Wright from the wreckage.  Orville suffered a broken leg, and three broken ribs.  While the ambulance carried his friend away, Charlie broke down crying.

 

The man who had taken Charlie's seat, Thomas Selfridge (above on stretcher) suffered a skull fracture, and never regained consciousnes.  But it was also in Charlie’s character that he tore the wreckage apart until he found out exactly what had caused the crash. Vibrations had caused one of the propellers to delaminate. Two feet snapped off.  That projectile cut one of the wires holding the tail in place, which caused the tail to collapse, which caused the Wright Flyer to nose dive into the ground.  Charlie was able to quickly fix these faults in all future aircraft.

He was a painfully shy mechanical genius, the man who maintained the “Vin Fiz Flyer” most of the way across the continent. Without Charlie Taylor there would have been no transcontinental flight, and no Wright Brothers either - and they all knew it.

Charlie went to work for the brothers in 1901 at $18 for a sixty hour week in their bicycle shop (above), and he stayed because their personalities fit so well together. Explained Charlie, “The Wrights didn’t drink or smoke, but they never objected too much to my cigar smoking….Both the boys had tempers, but no matter how angry they ever got I never heard them use a profane word…(and) I never let go with anything stronger than heckety-hoo.”

Charlie and the brothers sketched out the world’s first wind tunnel on scrap pieces of paper, and then Charlie built it (above). Without that testing device, powered flight would have had to wait for accidental discovery. What the Wright Brothers and Charlie achieved was not just powered flight, but the scientific approach to powered flight, prediction and experimentation, proving powered flight before it had even been made.  And that made improvements possible and predictable. 

After letters to automobile manufactures failed to find a suitable engine, Charlie built the first aircraft motor (and only the second gasoline engine he had ever built) from scratch, in just six weeks, using only a drill press, a metal lathe and some hand tools. At every step of the Wright Brothers innovations, Charlie Taylor was vital to the process.

In 1911 Cal Rogers approached Charlie and offered him $70 a week - plus expenses - to travel with the “Vin Fiz Flyer” across country and keep it in the air (above, Charlie and Cal, repairing the Flyer.). “At the time my wages were $25 a week," explained Charley. "I told him I'd go; then I told ‘Orv ‘about it. He asked me not to quit. I told him I had already given my word to Rodgers and couldn't very well back out. He told me to make it a sort of leave of absence, and to be sure and come back.” And that was how Charlie began what he later called “…my adventures”.

Charlie never had any doubt Cal would make it. He sent his wife and three children ahead to California to await his arrival. But Charlie was no diarist. He left behind no impressions of what it was like to be cooped up with Mable Rogers and Maria (Rogers) Swietzer for all those days and nights. But I am not surprised that Charlie quit not long before matters came to a head between Lucy Belevedere and Mable. I imagine the drama and the emotion made Charlie very uncomfortable. He jumped the train in Texas and hurried on to meet his family in Los Angles because his wife had become ill.. He took his wages from the trip and bought several hundred acres along the Salton Sea. But it was almost a year before his wife was feeling well enough for Charlie to return to his job in Ohio.

But things had changed. While he had been away, in May of 1912,  Wilbur had died of typhoid fever. Orville made sure Charlie had a job, but, according to Charlie, “I found it wasn’t like old times….the pioneering days seemed over for me.”  Finally, in 1919, Charlie left the Wright Company and returned to California. He opened his own machine shop on his property on the Salton Sea. “I waited for something to happen there,” Charlie said later, “and nothing did.” Except that his wife died and the depression of the 1930's drove him out of business, and he lost his land.

Charlie moved to Los Angeles and found a job working for North American Aviation for 37 cents an hour. He told no one about his past. He was just another production line mechanic. None of his fellow workers knew that he had helped to invent the entire industry. And that was where Henry Ford found him.

Ford was rebuilding the Wright Brothers workshop in Dayton as a memorial, and had hired detectives to track Charlie down. 

Ford brought Charlie back to reconstruct the wind tunnel and put the original 1903 Flyer back together.  In 1941, his work for Ford finished, Charlie quietly went back to California and returned to work in a defense plant. Then in 1945, Charlie suffered a heart attack. He was never able to work again. When Orville Wright died in 1948 he left Charlie an annuity in his will of $800 a year. 

By 1955 inflation had reduced that to a pittance, and when a newspaper reporter found Charlie, he was surviving in the charity ward of a Los Angles hospital. Immediately the aviation community raised funds, and Charlie was able to spend his last months in a private hospital, under far better care.

He died at the age of 88 in 1956. He is remembered in the Folded Wings Mausoleum, in Valhalla Memorial Park (above), directly under the approach to Burbank Airport runway 15-33.

Charlie Taylor lived for 48 years after he gave up his seat to a young Army Lieutenant. And he never did learn to fly. And that too was typical for Charlie Taylor, the unsung hero of powered flight.

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AIR HEADS Part Three

 

I figure that Cal Rogers (above)  was feeling pretty confident on the morning of Saturday, 23 September, 1911.  He had just received word that one of his competitors, Jimmy Ward,  had dropped out of the “Hearst Coast-to-Coast Race” after crashing (yet again!) 5 miles outside of Addison, New York.  Cal already knew his other competitor,  Bob Fowler, had failed in his third attempt to get over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, finally cracking up near the summit  at Donner Pass, and reducing his Cole Flyer to kindling and canvas. 

That left just himself, Cal Rogers, the six foot four inch deaf adventurer from Pittsburgh in the running for the $50,000.00 first place prize.

Of course, Cal still had to get to California within the time limit.  He was barely a tenth of the way across the continent now, and he had already crashed three times. This should not have been surprising since he had been a pilot for all of four months. He had less than 60 hours of flying experience. He knew little to nothing about navigation by air, and there was no one to teach him. In short, Cal was at the very edge of human experience in flight, both physically and mechanically. 



The Wright engine (above) on his “Vin Fiz Flyer" had no throttle. The 4 cylinder engine was either on or off, at full power or at zero. The pilot had only one way to alter his speed, other than turning the engine on and off, and that was to “advance the spark”,  meaning to alter the instant in the compression cycle when the spark plug fired. In a modern internal combustion engine of the 1920's this would be controlled mechanically. 

But in the Wright engine of 1911 it was done by physically unscrewing one or two of the spark plugs a fraction of turn into or out of the cylinder by head. The engines' designer and builder, Charlie Taylor,  had taken a leave of absence from the Wright workshop in Ohio to accompany the "Vin Fiz Flyer" across the country.  And with all the other pressing work on Charley's calendar,  this was the best and simplest method Charlie had come wit so far, for fine tuning the airplane's speed. 

It took three days to repair the Vin Fiz after the crash at Middletown, New York on 17 September. So Cal did not return to the race until Thursday, 21 September, 1911.  His first leg that day was to be a hop to Hancock, New York (above), 40 miles east of Binghamton.  But half way there Cal noticed his radiator had sprung a leak. He kept an eye on the precious water dripping out of his engine and then, just as he was over the town - POP! -  a spark plug flew out of engine.  Unscrewing the spark plug to adjust the speed evidently also allowed the plug to vibrating itself right out of the engine.

In an instant, the 4 cylinder Wright engine lost 25% of its power, and the plane had precious little to spare. Cal suddenly found himself plummeting for the ground. He managed to steer for an open field,  pulling the "Vin Fiz's" nose up at the last second to make a cash landing. But it was still a crash. Again, there was nothing to do but wait for the his service train, the "Vin Fiz Special".

The next two weeks would prove to be difficult, as California receded farther and farther away in distance and in time. While making a normal landing at Binghamton, New York,  Cal would later say, “…There was a snap of breaking timber and my right skid had gone". 

The broken skid was easily replaced (above) over night, from the supplies carried on board the rolling repair shop.... 

...in the Vin Fiz Special's hanger car. Directly behind was the Pullman car, carrying Cal’s wife Mable Mae, and his mother Maude (nee Rodgers) Sweitzer. 

Maude Sweitzer (above) was there to support her son, but her presence strengthened the divorce suite recently filed by her second husband, Henrey Sweitzer.  In July Henrey had charged Maude with "cruel and barbarous treatment and indignities...and desertion without cause".  Henrey might have named Cal at the co-respondent in the divorce, since it seemed Maude had abandoned her wealthy second husband for her son....her married son, whose wife was sharing the Pullman car with her mother-in-law. 

Also sleeping onboard the Pullman was chief mechanic Charley Tailor (above). and a rotating collection of Hearst reporters and photographers. The second mechanic, Charles (Wiggie) Wiggen, and three assistant mechanics all slept in the baggage/repair car. 

With such generous support, Cal was airborne again on Friday morning 22 September, 1911. But that afternoon, as Cal attempted a landing at Elmira, New York,  he snagged some telegraph wires. More repairs were required. 

As Cal traversed the border lands between Pennsylvania and western New York State, he hit a patch of good weather and made up some time, at least until late on Sunday afternoon of 24 September. Just after Cal had taken off from Salamanca,  high up on the Allegheny River, another spark plug vibrated its way out of the Wright engine. 

This time Cal coolly reached behind his back, grabbed the hot plug in his glove just before it popped completely out. He twisted it back into the cylinder and held it in place as he made a perfect landing (with one hand) on the Seneca Indian reservation near where the Red House River joined the Allegheny. 

Cal now screwed the spark plug firmly back in and, with help of a couple of Senaca Indians turned the plane around for take off.  But he couldn’t work up enough speed and had to abort. He tried again, but the second attempt also failed to get airborne.  Each time the two helpful locals had tried to warn Cal that he was aiming at a barbed wire fence. But either because he didn’t understand what they were saying (he was deaf,) or because he was in such a rush, Cal ignored their warnings.

The third time proved to be the charm. Cal taxied directly into the barbed wire fence, ripping the fabric covering the right wing to shreds, and wrapping the prickly barbed wire around the frame. It would take two days to free the “Vin Fiz Flyer” and allow her to soar yet again.

Cal was back in the air on Wednesday, 27 September , and had safe landings all that day and the next. But on Friday, 29 September he was grounded by bad weather. Still, Saturday, 30 September saw him break out of the Alleghenies and enter the rolling farm lands of the old Middle West. The "Vin Fiz" covered an impressive 200 miles on 30 September, but that was still 50 miles short of the distance he had intended to average. 

He would have gone further but a clogged fuel line forced him down late in the day near Akron, Ohio. Cal spent that night fending off curious cows who seemed determined to crush his fragile airplane under their big fat hooves. Or maybe they were just looking to catch a flight to some place more respectful of vegetarians.

On Sunday, the first day of October, 1911,  Cal stopped at first Mansfield and then Marion, Ohio, before being forced down by another clogged fuel line at Rivare, Indiana, just over the state line. Under threatening skies Cal cleared the fuel line and took off again, only to fly directly into a thunderstorm -  the first pilot to ever do so. As lightning snapped around his plane, Cal was the first pilot to experience downdrafts and wind shear, and as quickly as he could, Cal landed the "Vin Fiz" again, in the tiny Hoosier town of Geneva.  As soon as the weather cleared he flew on to Huntington, Indiana, where he was met by an enthusiastic crowd.

The next morning, Monday, 2 October, the winds were still gusting and again Cal had a hard time working up speed on his 35 horsepower Wright engine. Just as he felt his skids leave the ground he realized he was heading for a crowd of people.

Cal yanked the stick to the left, passed under telegraph wires, and then bounced his left wing off the ground.  Cal was thrown out of his seat and scrapped his forehead. The left wing of the “Vin Fizz” was crumpled and folded up. 

But the “lucky” bottle of soda (above) dangling from the strut was unbroken, yet again. Or so said the Vin Fiz publicity agents.  It would take two days to repair the “Vin Fiz”, essentially its third complete rebuild since starting the race.

On Wednesday 4 October Cal flew to Hammond, Indiana, where he landed just before 6 P.M., on a plowed field on the Jarnecke Farm. He slept that night in the comfort of the Majestic Hotel. But high cross winds kept him grounded for another two days.

Finally, in desperation, on Saturday, 7 October, 1911, Cal loaded the “Vin Fiz” aboard his train and moved it just across the border to the village of Lansing, Illinois, where he found a fallow field with a wind break. This allowed him to safely take off again. As his journey westward by rail had not moved him closer to Chicago, technically, he had not advanced his position in the race.  Or so said the Fin Fiz spin doctors.

Cal Rogers finally reached the new air field in Cicero, Illinois (above), on the west side of Chicago, on the Sunday afternoon of 8 October. By the rules, Cal now had less than two weeks to fly the remaining 3,000 miles across the Mississippi, the Kansas and Nebraska flat lands, the Rocky Mountains, the Great American desert and then the Sierra Nevada mountains. Cal Rogers was the only man still in the race, but he was running out of time.

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