Wings for the Fleet. George Van Deurs
Dewey and Winthrop were naval aviation’s best friends. Their direct help, however, was limited. The General Board could only give advice, which the Secretary was not bound to accept. The Assistant Secretary dealt only with Navy yards, except when, in Mr. Meyer’s absence, he was “acting” secretary. Chambers took full advantage of this exception. Most of the pioneering moves which required the Secretary’s approval were signed, “Winthrop, acting.”
Chambers sent a summary of his first studies to the General Board. He believed that the performance and reliability of aeroplanes would improve rapidly. They would soon be able to land on, or take off from, a ship. Someday, they might even fight, but for the immediate future he recommended they be developed for scouting only. This last opinion did not suit one new Board member, Captain Bradley A. Fiske.
Fiske was a veteran of the battle of Manila Bay. He had arrived in the Navy Department from command of the Tennessee, had been told to study war plans, and had quickly concluded that the plans to defend the Philippines were inadequate. Two years senior to Chambers, he was an inventor who experimented with radio before Marconi and had developed a telescopic gun sight and an optical range finder.
3. Chief Constructor Richard M. Watt. (National Archives)
Bradley Fiske had never seen a flying machine in the air. No aeroplane had yet flown either from a ship or from the water. The Navy had neither a plane nor a pilot. Despite all this, at a meeting of the General Board, this little man, who ignored bothersome details to tackle big problems, proposed to defend the Philippines with four naval air stations. Each was to be equipped with one hundred planes to sink transports and boats if the Japanese tried to land in the islands. If they made the planes big enough, Fiske said, they could launch torpedoes against the transports.
Rear Admiral Richard Wainwright protested, “Why waste the time of the General Board with wildcat schemes?” The proposal was dropped and everyone forgot about it, except, of course, Fiske. His idea was an arrow, shot into the future. Two years later he was granted a patent on a torpedo plane.
A few days after this General Board meeting, Winthrop, “acting,” signed orders for Chambers and the two liaison officers to be present as official observers at the International Air Meet opening at Belmont Park on 22 October 1910. There, for the first time, Chambers closely inspected flying machines, met the men who had invented and were building them, and talked with the sportsmen fliers and professional pilots.
Most of the professional pilots knew little about the “why” of their machines. They had been parachute jumpers, balloonists, racing drivers, or circus stunt men. Few of them ever formally learned how to fly. They took off by luck, superstition, and rule of thumb, and then landed by sheer audacity and agility. They would try anything for publicity and big money. These men were the mainstays of the exhibition teams, but they bored thoughtful men like the Wrights and Curtiss. Chambers found them uninteresting because they could only discuss flying in terms of muscular exercises and sensations.
Eugene Ely, the self-taught flier from the West Coast, was an exception. Chambers found him an amiable young man. Curtiss liked and trusted him more than his other pilots. Unlike the daredevils, Ely had a logical theory of flight and a keen interest in the machines. He spent a lot of his time on the ground working with Glenn Curtiss. Both men were interested in producing aeroplanes that would be more useful than merely providing sport.
When he first met Glenn Curtiss, Chambers was surprised to find that this 32-year-old inventor looked more like a quiet, shy farmer in an oversized coat than a spectacular speed king. At first Curtiss could only find disconnected monosyllables to explain his machines. He would lay hold of an elevator and say, “down,” move it, and say “up.” Chambers mentioned an intelligence report on the Frenchman, Henri Fabre, and his takeoff from the water at Rheims. Could Curtiss build a machine that would fly from the water? This question seemed to spark Curtiss’ own enthusiasm and dispelled his self-consciousness. He talked more easily of his past failures and his present hopes. He and Chambers discussed hydroaeroplanes at some length. When the meet was over, Chambers was convinced that Curtiss’ hydro would soon succeed, and Curtiss believed that, when it did, the Navy would be his customer.
Among the aeroplane builders, Chambers thought the Wrights were using the best approximation of scientific methods. At the same time, he was appalled at how much they all relied on “cut-and-try” procedures.
They had to, the Wrights pointed out. No adequate aeronautical engineering knowledge existed. There was no aeronautical mathematics. Would planes improve faster if some sort of national laboratory developed basic information for all designers? Could planes fly from a ship? Chambers put these questions to almost everyone at Belmont Park, and the answer they gave him was yes to both questions.
The Wrights were cordial and obviously eager to interest the Navy in their work. However, Chambers felt some intangible, persistent reserve. Possibly, since they knew he was also talking with Curtiss, it was a shadow of the hatred engendered by the patent suit. After the Belmont Air Meet, Chambers and Curtiss exchanged ideas and frank opinions in personal letters. Chambers did the same with Loening, the Wrights’ manager. But he had few such exchanges with the Wrights themselves. Whatever caused this personal stiffness in the Wrights, it never kept Chambers from doing business with them.
The mechanical details of the forty-odd machines at Belmont Park claimed most of Chambers’ interest. Beginning with Santos-Dumont’s tiny monoplanes, he studied them carefully. He admired the way French fliers pulled parts from crates, quickly assembled them, and then took off. They never wasted time with preflight adjustments or warm-ups, like other pilots. Could similar machines be built with parts small enough to go through a cruiser’s hatches? The obvious instability of all planes started the captain following Langley’s thinking. He convinced himself that ship-design methods and automatic-steering engines, like those of a torpedo, could make an aeroplane as stable as a skiff on a pond.
He watched aviators who, in order to win big cash prizes, flew in bad weather, but he did not give their piloting the attention he gave their machines. Maybe he thought flying easy because the boasting of the dare-devils sounded like old sailors’ yarns, or because they broke a few machines but no bones. Without much investigation he concluded that any seagoing officer could quickly master an aeroplane. Once learned, he assumed, flying would be like riding a bicycle; the trick would never be lost.
Chambers left the eight-day Belmont Park meet convinced that the Navy could and should develop naval aircraft. He thought a naval aeronautical organization and a national aeronautical laboratory desirable to speed the project. Thereafter he became a missionary with a cause. Opponents’ arguments always made him more certain that he alone saw the light. No matter how many details of his conclusions would prove erroneous, he would remain dedicated to the improvement of naval aviation.
4. Eugene Ely and J. A. D. McCurdy—both members of the Curtiss Exhibition Team. They and eleven other members of the team thrilled the countryside with their spectacular flying in 1910 and 1911.
As naval aviation grew and spread into the Fleet, some unknown individual coined two terms which distinguished enthusiasts for naval aviation from their more conservative and skeptical brother officers. It derived quite naturally from an aspect of their dress. All naval officers wore black shoes; the aviators, brown shoes. Thus, flying officers were “brown shoes,” while shipboard officers became the “black shoes.” For some years before World War II, it was the “brown shoes” versus the “black shoes.”
After the meet at Belmont Park, Chambers figuratively put on brown shoes for the rest of his life.
On 3 November 1910, another air show opened at Halethorpe Field near Baltimore. Again, Chambers left his desk in Washington to attend. Many of the Belmont pilots sent their planes to the Baltimore show, but an expressmen’s strike held up delivery of most of the planes and, on opening afternoon, only two Curtiss planes flew. One of these was flown by Eugene Ely. Ely was feeling pretty confident.