Unlocking the Sky by Seth Shulman Page B

happy for the extra time together and it helped having such a competent extra hand at the shop. It was a somewhat unusual arrangement in Hammondsport at the time, but Glenn and LenaCurtiss were both too industrious and practical to ever worry much about social conventions. Lena, the daughter of a local lumberman, was no stranger to work outside the home. She had been a grape picker—the seasonal work common for many teenage girls in the region—when she first met Curtiss.
    By most accounts, Curtiss was always so distracted by things mechanical that he never showed any interest in girls before meeting Lena. But he noticed something about her. During their first encounter, when Lena was seventeen and Curtiss was just a year older, she offered him water while he was taking a breather from bicycling along a hilly country road on the outskirts of town. With brown, wavy hair and big eyes, she seemed as forthright, unpretentious, and basically shy as he was. Oddest of all to Curtiss as he came to know her better, she seemed to genuinely like and admire his interest in mechanical things. They were married within the year and remained unusually close throughout their lives together.
    Five years into their marriage, when Lena began to work at her husband’s manufacturing shop, she understood well that Curtiss’s work was much more than just a job for him. He always seemed to be turning over technical problems in his mind and never seemed happier than when he was building something new. Working beside her husband suited Lena just fine.
    According to one account, before they were married, Lena’s father had been impressed by Curtiss. “That boy is going places,” he liked to say, predicting that someday Curtiss “would have Lena living in a brick house.” Clearly, Glenn Curtiss was going places. But she’d laugh when she would tell the story years later, adding that, for all the adventure she “never did get that brick house.”
    With a deluge of orders for motorcycles from around the country, it is not surprising that Glenn and Lena Curtiss did not pay muchattention to an odd letter from a “Captain” Baldwin placing an urgent order for a motorcycle engine to be used in an airship. Baldwin’s reputation as a showman may well have filtered all the way to Hammondsport, but it was not enough to keep Curtiss from being highly skeptical about the prospect of using one of his engines in flight. He did fill the order, however. With no two-cylinder engines on hand, Curtiss actually removed one from a recently minted motorcycle to ship to Baldwin. Curtiss was heard then and for sometime afterward referring to anyone wanting to take his engines aloft as an “aviation crank.” But above all, he was a practical businessman: people could use his engines however they wished.
     
    If Curtiss had doubts about flying, his views on aviation would change dramatically later in 1904 when Captain Baldwin showed up at his door.
    Baldwin came by train to Hammondsport in the fall of that year directly after a stunning success with his dirigible at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a world’s fair held in St. Louis, Missouri. The fair was an enormous event, designed to commemorate the centennial of the purchase of the Louisiana Territory. President Teddy Roosevelt even attended to review the opening parade. With a $100,000 grand prize for the best demonstration of an aircraft, the fair’s organizers had drawn the attention of every aviator in the world, including Santos-Dumont.
    Even the Wright brothers were tempted to display their flying machine. With the urging of their mentor Octave Chanute, the Wrights went so far as to visit the St. Louis fairgrounds and to ask the rules committee to make the contest guidelines more favorable to the inclusion of heavier-than-air machines. But ultimately, eventhe lavish prize money could not lure the Wrights into a public display.
    With the Wrights’ refusal to enter and with Santos-Dumont’s dirigible