Glenn Curtiss and the Audacity of the Possible

Straying from her formal European-history focus, Sophie takes on early American aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss and contrasts him with a similarly audacious and gravity-defying innovator.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2599997/episodes/18768959

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Glen Curtis and the Audacity of the Possible, a podcast by Sophie Manners. Hello and welcome back. I'm Sophie Manners, Professor of European History at Queen's College, Cambridge, author of biographies, and the person in my department who, when the faculty common room conversation turns to American history, is expected to nod knowledgeably while privately acknowledging that my expertise ends somewhere around the Atlantic Ocean and does not reliably resume until you reach France. I say this in the spirit of transparency, because today we are going somewhere I do not usually go. We are going to upstate New York, we are going to a bicycle shop, and we are going to spend the next half hour in the company of a man who was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most consequential inventors and aviators in American history, and who is remembered today with approximately one-tenth of the fame he deserves, which is either a function of geography, or of the fact that he had the misfortune to conduct his greatest work in the shadow of two brothers from Ohio, who were very good at being famous, and who also had lawyers. I want to say something about this series before we begin. We have, in previous episodes, spent time with figures whose lives contain tragedy, mysticism, martyrdom, and the kind of world historical drama that makes a historian reach instinctively for the good biscuits. Joan of Arc was burned at nineteen. Matahari was shot at forty-one. Rasputin survived being poisoned, shot and beaten before finally succumbing to a river. Arthur Conan Doyle spent his final years attempting to photograph fairies. Charlemagne ordered the execution of four and a half thousand people before breakfast, and then reformed the entire European administrative system before lunch. Today's subject did none of these things. He was not martyred, he was not mystical. He did not commune with the dead or die facing a firing squad or build an empire on the bones of his enemies. What he did was considerably more straightforwardly extraordinary and considerably less well known, and I intend to do something about both of those things. Glen Hammond Curtis, born may twenty first, eighteen seventy eight, in Hammondsport, New York, died july twenty third, nineteen thirty, in Buffalo, New York. In between those two dates, the fastest motorcycle ever built, up to that point in human history, the first official public airplane flight in America, the invention of the seaplane, the invention of the flying boat, the training of the first American military pilots, a patent dispute with the Wright brothers that consumed a decade and generated enough legal correspondence to fill a reasonably sized archive, the founding of what became the United States Navy's aviation program, and a real estate venture in Florida that was going rather well until a hurricane intervened, because Glen Curtis was not a man to whom history gave a quiet retirement. He was also, I should tell you immediately, not a man who fits neatly into the biographical mould I usually work with. He was not a tragic figure. He was not a complicated villain. He was not wrestling with theological doubt or conducting seances or ordering mass executions. He was, by the available evidence, a genuinely decent, remarkably focused, practically brilliant human being who was very good at making things go fast, and who had the particular kind of mind that looks at a problem and immediately begins thinking about mechanisms rather than implications. He was, in the best possible sense, an engineer. And I say that as someone whose relationship to engineering is primarily appreciative and entirely non technical, in the way that the British relationship to most practical competence tends to be. Let us begin in Hammondsport, which is a small town at the southern tip of Couca Lake, in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. It is by all accounts a beautiful part of the world, rolling hills, lake views, vineyards, the kind of American landscape that makes a person from Kingston upon Thames feel vaguely underdressed by nature. Hammondsport in the eighteen eighties was a town of perhaps a thousand people, and Glenn Curtis was born into it with the modest advantages of a lower middle class family, and the significant disadvantage of losing his father Frank to Bright's disease when Glenn was five years old. His mother, Lua, moved the family to Rochester briefly, before returning to Hammondsport to live with Glen's grandmother. He left school at fourteen. He had, in formal educational terms, approximately the same foundation as Jean Monet, and somewhat more than Charlemagne, which tells you a great deal about the relationship between formal education and extraordinary achievement that I find both professionally inconvenient and personally encouraging. He worked in his teenage years for Eastman Kodak in Rochester, an interesting biographical detail, since George Eastman's company was, at exactly this moment, doing to photography what Curtis would shortly do to aviation, making something extraordinary accessible to ordinary people through the systematic application of practical ingenuity. He returned to Hammond Sport and opened a bicycle repair shop, which is, of course, exactly what the Wright brothers did, and which suggests that either there was something specifically generative about bicycle mechanics in America in the eighteen nineties, or that the people drawn to bicycle mechanics in the eighteen nineties were a particular type of practically gifted, mechanically restless mind that the era needed and produced in some quantity. I incline toward the latter explanation. The bicycle was the technology that required precision engineering without requiring industrial capital. It was the workshop of the practical genius in the age before the internal combustion engine made everything both more powerful and more expensive. Curtis moved from bicycles to motorcycles in the early 1900s, and here the first hint of his particular character emerges. He did not merely sell motorcycles or repair motorcycles. He built his own engines, he modified his own frames, he tested them himself personally, at speed on public roads, with the equanimity of a man who either had a very well developed sense of his own mechanical competence, or a very underdeveloped sense of his own mortality, and the evidence suggests it was primarily the former. In nineteen oh four he began supplying lightweight engines to a man named Thomas Baldwin, who was building dirigibles, steerable airships, and who needed exactly the kind of compact, powerful, reliable motor that Curtis was producing. This was Curtis's entry into the world of flight, and it was characteristically indirect and practical, not driven by the romance of aviation, not by a theoretical vision of what flight could become, but by the immediate concrete problem of a man who needed an engine. Curtis built him one. It worked. This is how Curtis operated throughout his career. Someone had a problem. He solved it. The solution generally turned out to be rather more important than either party had originally anticipated. In nineteen oh seven, he joined the Aerial Experiment Association, which is one of those names that sounds like it should have more members than it did. It had five, and one of them was Alexander Graham Bell, who was by this point in his late sixties and had already invented the telephone, and was spending his considerable remaining energy and resources on whatever interested him, which at this particular moment was flight. The other members were a group of young engineers and experimenters, including John McCurdy and Frederick Baldwin, and Glenn Curtis, who was designated director of experiments, which meant that he was the one who was actually expected to make the aeroplanes fly rather than theorize about their flying. The AEA built a series of aircraft in 1907 and 1908. The most significant was the June bug, designed primarily by Curtis, which on July 4th, 1908, and the date is not accidental, the 4th of July was chosen deliberately, flew a distance of just over a mile at Hammondsport, in front of a crowd of observers winning the Scientific American Trophy for the first public airplane flight in America. I want to pause on the phrase public airplane flight, because it is doing rather a lot of work in that sentence. And the work it is doing is directly connected to the patent dispute that will occupy us shortly. The Wright brothers had flown Kitty Hawk in December 1903. This is not disputed. It is one of the best documented and most consequential moments in the history of human technology, and nothing I say about Glen Curtis should be construed as diminishing it. However, and this is a however of considerable historical importance, the Wright brothers' flights at Kitty Hawk were not public. They were witnessed by a small number of people, documented by the brothers themselves, and not demonstrated to the wider world in any systematic way for several years afterward. The brothers were, for reasons that were partly strategic and partly temperamental, extremely protective of what they had done, and extremely cautious about demonstrating it. Curtis, by contrast, flew in public for a crowd for a prize, and anyone who wanted to watch was welcome to do so. This distinction between the private achievement and the public demonstration is not merely a matter of personality. It shaped in very concrete ways what aviation in America actually became. The Wright brothers held patents on their flight control system, specifically on the method of wing warping, by which the pilot controlled the lateral balance of the aircraft by twisting the wings. Curtis used ailerons, separate hinge surfaces on the wings, to achieve the same effect. The Wrights sued on the grounds that ailerons were functionally equivalent to wing warping and therefore infringed their patent. The case wound through the American courts for nearly a decade, from nineteen oh nine to nineteen seventeen, consuming enormous quantities of money, energy, and legal ingenuity on both sides. There were moments during this period when the patent dispute was genuinely threatening to strangle American aviation. Manufacturers were reluctant to build, investors were reluctant to invest, and the whole nascent industry sat in a kind of legal amber while other countries who were not encumbered by the Wright Brothers intellectual property attorneys got on with building and flying aeroplanes. I find this episode instructive in a way that goes beyond the specific legal question. The Wright brothers were genuinely brilliant. Their achievement at Kitty Hawk was real and should not be diminished, but the manner in which they pursued the patent dispute, the aggressiveness of it, the comprehensiveness of it, the evident desire not merely to be compensated for their invention, but to control the entire development of American aviation through legal ownership of its fundamental principles. This manner was, in the judgment of most historians, and eventually the United States government counterproductive to the point of being damaging to the national interest. In 1917, with the United States about to enter the First World War and desperately needing an aviation industry capable of producing military aircraft at scale, the government essentially compelled the creation of a patent pool that allowed manufacturers, including Curtis, to build without legal encumbrance. The Wright brothers' lawyers had by this point done more to retard American military aviation than any foreign power had managed. Curtis, throughout this period, continued to build and fly. In 1909, he won the Gordon Bennett Trophy race at the world's first international air meet in Rams, France, flying a Curtis biplane to victory against European competitors at a speed of just over forty-seven miles per hour, which sounds modest until you remember, that four years earlier no one had flown at all in public, and also that the pilots were sitting in open frames with no cockpit, no windscreen, and no seat belt at altitude, which requires a particular kind of physical courage that I find frankly alarming from the comfort of a Cambridge office. He received a rapturous reception in France, which tells you something about the French relationship to aviation, enthusiastic, appreciative, immediately competitive, and also something about Curtis, who was, by all surviving accounts, modest, amiable, and entirely without the grandiosity that a lesser man might have found appropriate to the occasion. In 1910, Curtis made the first long distance flight in America, flying from Albany to New York City along the Hudson River, a distance of approximately 150 miles in stages, winning the ten thousand dollar prize offered by the New York World newspaper, and demonstrating, more importantly, that the aeroplane was not merely a fairground novelty, but a vehicle capable of practical cross country navigation. He flew low, following the river, and the people of the Hudson Valley came out of their houses and fields to watch. There are photographs. The people standing in the fields look upward with an expression that I find every time I look at it genuinely moving. The expression of people seeing something they did not know was possible and understanding in the moment of seeing it that the world has just changed. But the work for which I think Curtis deserves the most credit, the work that was most consequential for the most people over the longest term was the seaplane, and specifically the flying boat. The problem of early aviation was not fundamentally the flying part. People had worked out the flying. The problem was everything else taking off, landing, the requirement for a prepared flat surface, the catastrophic consequences of engine failure over terrain where no such surface existed. The aeroplane, in its first decade, was hostage to geography in a way that severely limited what it could actually do. Curtis looked at this problem and reached a characteristically practical conclusion. Most of the Earth's surface is water. Water is flat. Water does not require preparation. If you could build an aeroplane that could take off from and land on water, you had solved the geography problem at a stroke. He began experimenting with float plane designs in nineteen ten and nineteen eleven, attaching pontoons to conventional aircraft frames. The results were promising but imperfect. The pontoons created drag, altered the aerodynamics, and produced a machine that was neither a proper boat nor a proper aeroplane, but an uncomfortable compromise between the two. In nineteen twelve, he solved this with an elegant conceptual leap. Instead of attaching floats to an aeroplane, he made the hull of the aircraft itself into a boat. The flying boat, a fuselage shape to sit in the water and take off from it, with the engine and wings above, was the result. The Curtiss Model F flying boat of nineteen twelve was the first practical example of the type, and it was the ancestor of every maritime patrol aircraft, every transatlantic flying boat, every amphibious aircraft that followed it. The Navy took notice. Of course they did. An aircraft that could operate from the ocean was not merely a curiosity for the Navy, but a potentially transformative military technology. Curtis trained the first naval aviators. He worked with naval officers to develop the operational concepts for carrier aviation, the idea that aircraft could be deployed from ships, which required solving both the technical problem of taking off from and landing on a moving deck, and the institutional problem of persuading an admiral that this was a sensible use of naval resources, and which succeeded on both counts largely because Curtis's practical demonstrations were so compelling that the institutional resistance could not sustain itself against the evidence. The first takeoff from a ship in American history was made from a platform mounted on the deck of USS Birmingham in November 1910 by a pilot named Eugene Ely, flying a Curtis-Pusher biplane. Ealy landed on a ship for the first time in January 1911 on USS Pennsylvania. These two flights, separated by eight weeks, established the conceptual foundation of carrier aviation, which is to say, the conceptual foundation of the primary instrument of American naval power in the Second World War and every conflict since. Did not personally fly either of these missions, but the aircraft were his, the training was his, and the institutional relationships that made the demonstrations possible were substantially his. The carrier battle groups that currently project American power across the Pacific are in a very real genealogical sense, downstream of Glenn Curtis working on float plane designs in Hammondsport, New York, and here I want to pause because this is the moment to introduce someone who deserves rather more attention than he typically receives in the histories of early aviation, and whose story is, in its own quieter way, equally remarkable. Beckwith Havens was born in 1890 in New York City, twelve years younger than Curtis, and from a rather different social world. He was the son of a prosperous family, educated, polished, possessed of the kind of easy social assurance that good schools and comfortable circumstances tend to produce, and that Curtis, the self-educated mechanic from Hammondsport, conspicuously was not. He learned to fly at the Curtis Aviation School on Long Island in 1911, becoming one of the first licensed aviators in the United States, and subsequently became a Curtis exhibition pilot, barnstorming across America at a time when most Americans had never seen an aeroplane at all. The exhibition pilots of the early aviation era occupy a peculiar and rather wonderful place in the history of flight. They were the people who actually introduced aviation to the American public, not the inventors, not the military, not the newspapers, but the men and occasional women who loaded their biplanes onto railway cars and travelled from town to town, setting up in fairgrounds and farmers' fields and racetracks, and then climbing into their machines and flying over the heads of people who had never seen anything larger than a bird leave the ground under its own power, and who stood in fields and streets and rooftops, and watched with the kind of concentrated, astonished attention that the modern world, saturated with spectacle, has essentially lost the capacity for. Havens was one of the best of these pilots, skilled, reliable, personable enough to charm the crowds and the local dignitaries, brave enough to fly in conditions that more prudent men declined. He set early American records for altitude and duration. He flew in ways and places that regularly made the local newspapers, which was the point. Between nineteen eleven and nineteen sixteen, before military aviation absorbed the talent pool, he logged thousands of hours in Curtis machines in the open air without instruments, without radio, navigating by railroad tracks and river bends, and the kind of intimate topographical knowledge that only a man who has flown across America at low altitude dozens of times could accumulate. What I find particularly striking about Havens is the longevity of the whole enterprise. He lived until 1969. He was seventy nine years old when he died, and he had been present at essentially the entire arc of aviation history from the first tentative flights of open frame biplanes to the moon landing. He was alive when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. He had first flown less than a decade after the Wright brothers' first flight in a machine made of wood and wire and canvas, sitting in the open air with nothing between him and the atmosphere, but his own skill and his not inconsiderable nerve. The span of that life, from Hammondsport to the Sea of Tranquility in a single human lifetime, is one of those facts about the twentieth century that I find genuinely difficult to absorb however many times I encounter it. The rate at which the world changed in that century from the perspective of someone who had been present at its technological beginning is simply staggering. Curtis himself did not live to see the full flowering of what he had started. He died in 1930 of complications following an appendectomy at fifty two, the same age more or less, at which many of his most significant contributions were still generating downstream consequences that would only become fully visible in the Second World War a decade later. He had, by the end of his life, moved substantially into real estate development in Florida, specifically in the Miami area, where he founded the planned communities of Opaloka and Hyalea, but the hurricane of 1926 and the general collapse of the Florida land boom had taken the edge off that particular chapter. He died not poor, but having spent the last years of his life on ventures less connected to the thing he had been best at than any of us who admire him would wish. The patent dispute with the Wright brothers was settled eventually by the cross licensing agreement of 1917. By then, it cost both sides enormous sums, and contributed to the United States entering the First World War with an aviation industry less developed than those of France, Germany, and Britain, which is a historical irony of some magnitude, given that the Americans had invented the aeroplane in the first place. Legal triumphalism is, I note, rarely the unambiguous victory it appears at the time. Now, the T's in its proper place, and I will confess that I have found this one more genuinely difficult than the others in this series for a reason that I think is instructive. Curtis's story does not follow the tragic or the mystical or the grandiose arc. It is the arc of the practical genius, the person who is exceptionally good at solving real problems, who does so with consistency and without theatrics, who makes things that work and puts them in front of people who need them, and whose legacy is therefore embedded in other things rather than standing alone. This is, in terms of actual human benefits, probably the most valuable kind of legacy available. It is also the hardest kind of legacy to make theatrically compelling, which is why Curtis is not as famous as he should be, and why the people who most resemble him tend also to be less famous than they should be. Picture someone who came from modest circumstances with limited formal education, and who possessed a specific kind of practical intelligence, the kind that is less interested in theoretical frameworks than in whether the thing actually works. Someone for whom the question but can we build it was always more interesting than the question but should we imagine it? Someone whose career was defined by the iterative improvement of real machines rather than the proclamation of abstract visions. Picture someone who built an industry, not just a product, not just a company, but a category of human activity that did not exist before they started, and that is now so deeply embedded in the infrastructure of modern life that we have ceased to notice its origins. Someone who trained the people, who trained the people who built the systems we now depend on, someone whose influence is therefore several generations deep and correspondingly invisible, the invisible kind of influence that is, historically speaking, the most durable kind. Picture someone who had a serious dispute over intellectual property, over who owned the fundamental ideas that the new industry was built on, and who found themselves on the side of that dispute, that history, looking back, tends to regard as more practically useful, even if legally more complicated, someone who believed that good ideas should be built on and extended, and who found themselves in conflict with someone who believed with equal sincerity that good ideas should be owned. Picture someone who worked closely with the military, who understood before the military fully understood itself what new technology could do for national defence, and who built the institutional relationships and the training programs and the operational concepts that the military would need when the moment came, someone who was not himself a military figure, but whose civilian work became the foundation of military capability. Picture someone who is, in the popular imagination, a secondary figure, present in the footnotes, acknowledged in the histories, but not the name you mention first when you are explaining the beginning of the thing they helped begin. Someone who deserves better from memory, and who is perhaps best understood not as a lesser version of the more famous figure in their field, but as the person who answered the question the more famous figure had asked, the person who took the proof of concept and made it into a working world. Who is this person? It is Bert Rutan. I will give you a moment during which I expect approximately half of you to be nodding, and the other half to be reaching again, for your phones, and both responses are entirely reasonable. Albert Leander Rutan, known universally as Bert, was born in 1943 in Esticada, Oregon, which is, like Hammondsport, a small town that history would not normally expect to produce someone of his particular consequence. He built his first model aircraft at age eight. He studied aeronautical engineering at California Polytechnic State University, and graduated in 1965. He worked for the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base as a civilian flight test engineer. Which is one of those jobs that sounds like it was specifically designed to appeal to a person with exactly his combination of skills and temperament. In 1974 he founded the Rutan Aircraft Factory in Mojave, California, which is, again, not the kind of location that suggests world historical consequence, but which produced it nonetheless. What Rutan did, across a career of remarkable consistency and productivity, was build aircraft that other people said couldn't be built, not couldn't be built in the theoretical sense. Anyone can imagine an impossible aeroplane couldn't be built in the practical sense, couldn't be made to fly, couldn't be made affordable, couldn't be made reliable, couldn't be made without facilities and resources and institutional infrastructure that a small company in the Mojave Desert manifestly did not have. Rutan built them anyway, because he had the same relationship to the word can't that Curtis had, and that relationship was essentially one of polite but comprehensive disregard. The Varies and Long Easy were canard pusher aircraft, unconventionally configured, made from composite materials before composite materials were standard in aviation, designed to be built by amateurs from kits in their own garages. They were safe, efficient, fast, and beautiful, and they democratized private aviation in a way that the conventional light aircraft industry had signally failed to do. Rudon believed, as Curtis had believed, that flight should be accessible, that the technology should serve the people rather than being hoarded by the specialists. He designed kits, he wrote instructions, he put aircraft within the reach of people who could not afford to buy from established manufacturers, and who were prepared, given adequate guidance, to build their own. In 1986, the Voyager aircraft, designed by Bert Rutan and built and flown by his brother Dick Rutan and Gina Yeager, completed the first non-stop non-refueled circumnavigation of the globe. The flight took nine days, three minutes, and forty-four seconds. The aircraft, which now hangs in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, was made primarily of composite materials and looked like nothing anyone had built before, which was generally true of Routin's designs. When it landed at Edwards, the crowd that had gathered to welcome it was estimated at fifty thousand people. It was the kind of moment the crowd looking upward, the aircraft descending, the world changed. That rhymes across eighty years of aviation history with those photographs of the people standing in the Hudson Valley Fields, watching Curtis fly south. In 2004, Spaceship One, designed by Bert Rutan and funded by Paul Allen, became the first privately built and privately funded aircraft to reach space twice in a fortnight, which was the condition for winning the Ansari X Prize of ten million dollars, and also, more importantly, for demonstrating that access to space did not require a government and a budget that would make a finance minister weep. Spaceship One's design is the direct ancestor of Virgin Galactic's Spaceship Two. The commercial spaceflight industry, such as it is, traces a significant part of its conceptual lineage through Bert Rutan's workshop in Mojave. Now, the parallels with Curtis. First, the practical genius in the provincial workshop. Curtis built engines in Hammond Sport. Rutan built composite aircraft in Mojave. Both men operated at what was, in institutional terms, an enormous distance from the centres of their industry, far from the major manufacturers, far from the established research institutions, far from the people who were supposed to be doing the important work. Both produced from those distances innovations that the centres of their industry had not managed, and in some cases had not imagined. The provincial workshop is, I would argue, not incidental to this. The distance from institutional consensus is what allowed them to try things that the consensus would have advised against. Second, the democratizing instinct. Curtis wanted aviation to be public. His exhibitions, his Albany to New York flight, his flying boats designed for practical use rather than laboratory demonstration. Rutan designed aircraft that amateurs could build in garages. Both men were at their cause, opposed to the idea that the extraordinary should be the exclusive property of the privileged or the institutional. Both believed that if something was possible, it should be made accessible. This is a genuinely radical position when what is possible is as new as powered flight, and both men held it with the practical consistency of people who are less interested in the philosophy of accessibility than in the nuts and bolts of actually achieving it. Third, the military relationship. Curtis trained the first naval aviators and established the conceptual framework for carrier aviation. Rutan worked extensively with defense applications. His designs influenced military and manned aerial vehicles. His materials and structural innovations were adopted across military aviation while remaining fundamentally a civilian innovator. Both men were not soldiers, but were arguably more important to military aviation than many soldiers. Fourth, the intellectual property dimension. Curtis spent years in court with the Wright brothers over patent rights. Rutan has been protective of his designs, but has also, through the Kit Aircraft model, deliberately placed many of his innovations into the hands of the public rather than holding them in a proprietary system. The contrast with the Wright Brothers approach, which Rutan was surely aware of, is, I think, deliberate and reflects a consistent philosophy about how innovation should propagate. Fifth, the industry founding legacy. Curtis's work established American naval aviation. Rutan's work established the conceptual and technical foundations of commercial spaceflight. Both were founders not just of companies or aircraft types, but of entire categories of human activity. Both opened doors that, once opened, were not closed, and through which entire industries subsequently walked. Where do the parallels strain? Curtis died at fifty two, before the full consequences of his work had become visible. Rutan retired in twenty eleven at sixty eight, having lived to see commercial spaceflight become a functioning if nascent industry. He had the satisfaction of the long view that Curtis was denied. Curtis was primarily a builder of things that existed in the world already. The aeroplane existed, he improved and extended it. Routin's most significant contributions, composite amateur bill aircraft, commercial spacecraft were more categorically novel in their specific domains, though the underlying human impulse was the same, and the scales are different. Curtis's work fed directly into the Second World War's largest military aviation program in history, with consequences measured in millions of lives, and the outcome of the defining conflict of the twentieth century. Rutan's commercial space work is still, in 2024, early in its development, and its eventual consequences are genuinely unknown. It may matter as much, it may matter more. We do not yet have the perspective to judge. The verdict Glenn Curtis. And I deliver this verdict with the specific acknowledgement that it is of all the verdicts I have delivered in this series, the one where the margin feels smallest. Not because Rutan is less impressive, he is not less impressive, but because Curtis operated at the absolute beginning of the thing, when nothing was known and everything was possible, and the cost of being impressed. Wrong was measured in physical rather than financial terms, and he was right with the consistency that across a career of continuous invention and demonstration and practical achievement, I find simply extraordinary. He was also right about something that Bert Rutan has also been right about, and that I think is the deepest thing either of them has demonstrated that the future belongs to the people who build it, not to the people who own it or theorize about it or protect it with lawyers, to the people who get up in the morning and go to the workshop and work out what the machine needs to do next. I grew up in Kingston upon Thames. We have a very fine river side. We do not have a tradition of building flying boats and bicycle shops. This, I think, is our loss. There is something about the American relationship to practical innovation, the belief that any sufficiently determined person with a workshop and a sensible question can change the world that my own cultural tradition has always admired from a slightly respectful distance, in the way that the British admire things that they find both genuinely impressive and mildly exhausting. Glenn Curtis embodied this quality entirely, consistently, and without apparent effort, which is the most impressive way to embody anything. Glenn Hammond Curtis, born Hammond Sport, eighteen seventy eight, died buffalo nineteen thirty, motorcycle racer, exhibition pilot, seaplane inventor, founder of American naval aviation, the man who taught America to fly over water, and who did it because someone had a problem, and he was the sort of person who solves problems. Fifty two years comprehensively well spent. The Wright brothers get the monument, Curtis built the navy. History, as usual, distributes its credit with its characteristic mixture of partial accuracy and considerable injustice. We are here in some small part to correct the record. And Beckwith Havens, who flew Curtis Aeroplanes across an America that had never seen one, who lived to watch men walk on the moon, who was the human bridge between the impossible and the ordinary. He deserves a monument of his own. Perhaps someone should build him one. It would not need to be large, just something. Somewhere in a fairground in upstate New York, facing upward. I'm Sophie Manners. Thank you for being here. The Curtis Museum in Hammondsport is real, it is excellent, and I recommend it without reservation. Good night.