Art Smith's story; the autobiography of the boy aviator which appeared as a serial in the Bulletin

chapter I

PEOPLE are not interested in me. They are interested in my flying. When the crowd on the ground holds its breath, or shrieks, or wildly cheers, it is not because Art Smith is playing a dangerous game with Death up there in the clouds. It is because over their heads a man just like themselves is mastering the dangers of an almost unknown element.

My triumphs are not personal. They are new triumphs for all mankind.

Sometimes, when I feel the wings of my machine give that little, pulling lift that clears the ground, and I skim up into the air, I look down at those thousands of white, watching faces under me. Then I wonder what they feel as they see me sailing up over the Marina, past the seagulls, into the sky.

It is always thrilling to me to do it. It must be more thrilling to see, to a man who has always walked about with the solid earth under his feet.

Some day it will be no more thrilling than using a telephone. Within a short time — five years perhaps — licenses for aeroplanes will be issued as licenses for automobiles are issued now. Then a change will begin in human life — a change so tremendous we can not even imagine it today.

There are no frontiers for the aeroplane. The seacoast is only a green, wavering line thousands of feet below it. Mountains are just heaps of earth — it skims over them. There are no boundaries between States or countries when you look down upon them from three thousand feet in the air.

The greatest barrier between people is distance. Think what fifteen miles meant in the days when the only way to cover them was to walk them step by step. Fifteen miles away — it was an undiscovered country! Then railroads came, and street-cars, and automobiles. A man lives fifteen miles from his office now, and gets to work every morning on time. Fifteen miles is nothing. Two hundred miles is no more than that to the aeroplane, which will travel easily at 125 to 150 miles an hour.

The libraries are full of books written by men with their feet on the ground — books about human life, and human relations, and why they change, and what will happen next. I have not read these books. I am too busy flying. But I know that everything in the world today is built upon the idea of boundaries. I know that the aeroplane destroys them. I know that the changes which were made when the ocean was opened to travel, or when the railroads were built, meant nothing to mankind in comparison with the changes that will begin when the air-lanes are open.

Of course, there are only a few of us now who feel at home in the air — really at home, knowing the air and its ways, so that we can roll about up among the clouds like a kitten in a basket. Because we are pioneers in the air, with difficulties and dangers td overcome, it is interesting to know how we do it, and what it feels like.

The story of how I learned to do it is doubly interesting to anyone who is trying to do anything difficult in the world, because I think no one can have a harder time realizing his ambition than I had in learning to fly.

"He's just a fool kid with a crazy notion," they said about me, back in Fort Wayne, Indiana, when I said I was going to be an aviator, and left a five-dollar-a-week job to do it. It was a good job, for a fifteen-year-old boy, and they thought I should keep it.

"He has bulldog grit," my friends said.

They were wrong. I had grit — it was all I did have — but it was not the bulldog variety. A bulldog hangs on, but he does it with his teeth alone. I never noticed that a bulldog cared much about what he hung on to, just so he hangs on. I stuck to my idea, but I did it with all the brains I had.

A good illustration of my whole life is in the way I first looped the loop. It was after I had got through most of my early difficulties. With no money, no teachers, without ever seeing another aeroplane, against every opposition, I had built my first machine and learned to fly in it.

I had made a success in straight flying. Then I decided to loop-theloop.

I was testing a new propeller. It worked all right. So I turned the machine upward, and flew straight up into the air. There was a bank of clouds above me — it was" a gray day, down on the earth. I flew up through them, and came out into bright sunlight, about 2,500 or 3,000 feet high.

The man who said "Every cloud has a silver lining" knew what he was talking about, although probably he did not realize it. No matter how gray the clouds seem from below, when you look down at them they are always a fleecy, shining mass, with a shimmer like white silk.

They curled and shifted under me. The sky was bright blue overhead, full of sunshine.

"Good time to practice a loop," I said to myself, and pushed the wheel over hard.

Just as the planes stood on edge the engine stopped.

The only thing that keeps a machine off the ground is the resistance of the air under the horizontal planes.

When the engine stopped, half a ton's weight of wood and iron, with me strapped to it, fell like a dropped brick.

Six hundred feet below I managed to catch the air with the planes. The momentum of the fall gave me a little speed. I swung the machine upward again, on this speed, preparatory to volplaning back to earth. As I tilted her upward the engine started. I swung up into the blue sky with that engine humming along as sweet as ever.

As I swung around in a circle above the clouds I tried to figure it out. Nothing was wrong with the engine. After a time I tried it again. With all my strength I pushed the wheel over. The machine stood on edge; the engine stopped. Again I dropped.

This time I was ready. I caught the support of the air again in about four hundred feet, swung upward — the engine started.

Bulldog grit would have kept me at it — kept me at it until an air current down in those shifting clouds caught me just at the wrong second, and then —

But after that second time I flew back and forth until I had thought out the problem. When the machine is on end the gasoline in-take fails. The engine stops. The only thing that starts it again is that upward swing. If she picks up on the upward swing, I reasoned, all I need is sufficient momentum to turn the machine completely over and swing her upward — that was it — the momentum!

I flew another five hundred feet higher, pushed the machine over into a vertical dip, and dropped clean. When I judged the momentum was great enough I rammed the wheel over with all my might.

The machine turned completely over, in a beautiful curve. The engine picked up. I had looped my first loop.

Art Smith's Story.

Chapter II

IT was my determination to think things out which made it possible for me to loop-the-loop. It is the same determination which has made my success. That, and the fact that I have never had any real interest in anything except flying — and, of course, Aimee.

I remember when I first made up my mind to learn to fly. It was six years ago, the summer I was fifteen. Five of us had gone up from Fort Wayne to James Lake for a two weeks' camping trip — mother, Al, my chum, with a girl friend of his, Aimee and I. Aimee was fourteen. She was the only girl who had ever interested me as much as roller skates or a circus billboard.

I never cared much for girls till I met Aimee. My big interests were skating, Buffalo Bill and mechanics, especially mechanics — making things that would go. I made the first little wagon in town that would run with pedals, long before such things were on the market. I had a barnful of kites of all sorts, rigged up to drop little parachutes, or to whirl in the air. I experimented with electricity, too, and once shocked the solemn old house cat by giving her a saucerful of milk attached to a dry battery circuit.

When the circus came to town I was the first boy to get down to the railroad tracks in the middle of the night to watch them unload the elephants. Every stunt those circus performers did I tried for weeks afterward.

I remember when "leaping the gap on the bicycle" was first done in Buffalo Bill's big show on the circus grounds at the edge of town. I did not own a bicycle, but next morning I was up before daylight with a hammer, rigging up the same sort of springboards in our backyard, and I was leaping the gap on roller skates before my mother's horrified eyes that afternoon. I could leap a gap ten feet before the boards fell to pieces and I tried something else.

Girls were never interested in such things, and so I was never interested in girls. Then I met Aimee. She was a chunky little girl with red cheeks and the jolliest laugh I ever heard. She used to wear a little red sweater and a cap with a tassel on it, and she was game to the core, even then — one of the best pals a boy ever had.

She stood by me afterward through all the difficulties of the years when everyone told her I was a failure, when my clothes were in rags, and I was living on borrowed dimes. She was one of the prettiest, most popular girls in Fort Wayne, but she disobeyed her father, left her family and friends, and risked her life for me without a quiver. All that I have ever done of value and all that I can ever do belongs to Aimee, in return for what she did for me then.

All these things happened later. That summer at James Lake Aimee was a little girl with her hair in braids.

We had two tents beside the lake. Mother and the girls had one, Al and I bunked in the other. We made coffee over a camp 'fire and went fishing and swimming. Aimee was a great swimmer.

One afternoon just before sunset she and I were in a boat out on the lake. She was sitting up in the stern with a big bow in her hair, and I was lying on my back in the bottom of the boat looking up at the sky. There was a big turkey-buzzard up there, sailing around in big circles without moving his wings. I got to puzzling how he did it. Somewhere I had seen an article about the Wright brothers, who were just beginning to fly, and I thought about them, too, and wondered how a heavierthan-air machine could stay off the ground. I thought about the buzzard's wings and aeroplanes, and wondered if the same principle kept them in the air, and what it was.

"Don't you think so?" I heard Aimee say.

"Uh — what?" I said.

"Well, if that's all the attention you are going to pay to what I'm saying I think you can just go rowing by yourself after this," said Aimee, tossing her head.

"I was figuring out how to fly. I'm going to make a machine and fly in it," I said.

"How?" said Aimee. She was thunderstruck at the notion.

"Well," I answered, and lay there looking up at the sky again. It was a clear, blue sky, as placid to look at as a pond. I knew nothing about the treacherous whirlpools in the air, or the swift, rushing torrents and dangerous rapids in it.

"I don't know just how I'll do it, but I will. You'll see," I said.

"Well, of course, if you say you will, you will," Aimee admitted.

When we got back to Fort Wayne I collected all the mazagine articles on aeronautics I could find — they were very few then — and spent all my evenings poring over them.

Before that time dad and I usually figured on contracts after supper. Dad was a carpenter-contractor. He was a slow, quiet man, with a kind of silent strength. When I read "Snowbound" the "man of few words" in it reminded me of dad. He never had much to say, but you always knew he was there.

He had worked for seventeen years to come to the point when he could begin on his real ambitions. He wanted to do big things in his work. Then, just as he had started a business of his own, when the big things he wanted to do were almost within his reach, he had begun slowly to go blind.

It was the effect of a sunstroke, brought on by working too hard when he was a carpenter's helper.

He never spoke of it, but he fought the idea of blindness terribly. He was determined to see. Little by little he lost his grip on business. The good contracts went to someone else. But he held on, fighting every inch of the way.

The year before the trip to James Lake I had left school and gone to work in an architect's office. All dad had was the little cottage we lived in, and the income from his work was getting smaller every month.

Poring over those articles on aeronautics, I found there were thousands of dollars offered in prizes. There was the Scientific American prize, the Schebler prize, and others — in all nearly $100,000 was offered for good work in the air. It seemed to my fifteen-year-old mind that even the smallest of those prizes would make me a millionaire for life. And just a little money, even a few hundred dollars, perhaps, might save dad's eyes.

One evening, a month or so after I had begun reading these articles, dad reached for something at the supper-table and upset his glass of water. Mother caught it just as it splashed over. None of us said anything about it.

When supper was over and mother had cleared away the dishes and gone to the kitchen to wash them dad spread paper and pencils on the table and took his memorandum book out of his pocket.

"I guess we'll figure on that Robinson contract tonight, Art," he said.

I was sitting on the other side of the table, with my elbows on it, and my chin in my hands, thinking.

"Dad," I said, "I want to be an aviator."

Art Smith's Story.

chapter III

DAD turned the idea over in his mind without speaking. It must have been like a bombshell to him, he had been so proud of my work in the architect's office. He had thought I would be a successful man in his own line of work — the work his slowly approaching blindness was making impossible for him.

"Why?" he said, after a while.

It is hard for a fifteen-year-old boy to tell why he wants things. I wanted to learn to fly, but the reasons why I wanted it were all tangled up in my mind. Dad had to know just what they were. That was dad's way. He always had his own ideas in order in his mind; he thought things out in a straight line.

We sat there at the table a long time, while I talked about the Wright brothers, and read him some of the articles in my magazines. Mother came in while I was doing it.

Mother was a little, quick woman, all nerve and energy. Whenever she undertook to do anything, she did it. I never remember seeing her idle. She kept the house clean, had a big garden, did a great deal of church work, and always had time to help me make a kite or build a boat. She was president of the Ladies' Aid Society, and whenever she started to get a new church carpet or pay up the minister's salary it was as good as done.

This evening she came in with some mending, and went right to work at it.

" 'Art' wants to be an aviator," dad said to her.

"Goodness me! Isn't it awfully dangerous?" said mother.

Of course that was the natural way for her to look at it. There had been three children older than I. They all died when I was little. I was the only one left.

"I'll be careful," I told her, and explained to her as well as I could that there is no danger if the aviator keeps his head, and the air currents hold steady, and nothing is wrong with the machine.

"But doesn't the machine cost a great deal of money?" mother wanted to know then. To this day I have never convinced her about the danger.

"How much would a machine cost?" dad asked.

I figured up roughly — the engine, the planes, the wires, the supports.

"About eighteen hundred dollars," I said. "But there are nearly one hundred thousand dollars in prizes."

"I asked, how much would a machine cost. When you know that we'll talk about this again," said dad.

A week later I had all the figures.

"An aeroplane will cost $1,756.60, if I do all the work on it myself," I said one night at supper. Dad nodded.

"You could get that much by mortgaging the house," I said.

The muscles over dad's jaws tightened and set; he was pale. The house was clear; it was all we had.

"I suppose I could," he said, after a minute. He must have been talking about it with mother for she said nothing. She just looked anxious.

Then I built the little aeroplane. I worked on it at night, in my workshop in the barn. It was about twelve inches long, all made of tiny pieces of wood. Even the wings were wood. I could not get any cloth light and strong enough, so I bought some sheets of veneer from a furniture factory and sandpapered them until they were thin as tissue paper, and transparent. The engine was a tiny affair of wooden wheels and rubber bands.

I made that machine with most minute care, studying every drawing of an aeroplane I could find for ideas. I was sure it would fly.

It took me three or four months to finish it, and when it was done it was a beauty. One evening after supper I brought it out.

"It will fly," I said to dad and mother, and started it on the sitting-room carpet.

It ran along the floor. We stood there hardly breathing, watching. Then suddenly the little planes caught the air. Up it went. Three feet in the air the little machine sailed down the room.

"Come outdoors — I'll fly it there," I almost shouted. Dad and mother followed me out into the backyard. It was a still evening, just after sunset. I wound up the little engine and let it go running down the garden path between the tomato vines. Ten feet away it rose again, flying beautifully — rose and rose, steadily.

Then, before I could catch it, it struck the clothesline and smashed to bits.

"You see, it flew," I said to dad.

"Yes," said dad. "How did you make it?"

I told him. He made no comments. When he had gone into the house mother and I gathered up the pieces of the little aeroplane. They were good for nothing but kindling.

"You know about dad's eyes," I said to mother. "If I could make a real machine and fly in it I could make money, lots of money. Dad could go up to Chicago and see the doctors there."

Mother was still thinking of the danger to me. Besides, with dad's eyes failing every day, and his income already almost nothing, it was a big thing to stake everything they owned on a fifteen-year-old boy and his chance of success in a new thing like flying.

It seemed to me then that if I could only get a real aeroplane built the rest would be easy. That was because I knew nothing whatever about flying. The air, to me then, was only something to breathe, and to use in flying kites and aeroplanes. I did not know that air has the fluid, swirling force of a roaring waterfall and the crushing weight of an avalanche. The worst storm that ever smashed the sea to pieces against the cliffs at Land's End is calm as a cup of coffee compared to some things in a sunny blue sky. I learned that later.

Eager as I was for that aeroplane I said nothing more to dad about mortgaging the house. I suppose I had unconsciously learned from him to keep silent about my big thoughts.

I turned about in my mind every possible hope for getting eighteen hundred dollars — figured up, I remember, how long it would take me to save it from my wages of five dollars a week. I thought of the men I knew who had that much, and planned how to approach them and get them to lend it to me. I read everything I could find about aviation, and I began to build another little machine.

Dad helped me sandpaper some of the parts, and I told him all I had read, and explained the principle of. flying — how the planes rest on cushions of air, compressed by the speed of the machine. He listened, companionably, but said nothing. I knew by the light shining in the sitting-room long after I had gone to bed that he and mother were talking it over.

One evening late in the fall mother and dad both seemed awkward and nervous at supper. I wondered what had happened, thinking perhaps the doctors had said dad's eyes were worse than we thought.

After I had finished my pudding and pushed back the plate mother got up suddenly and stood by dad, with her hand on his shoulder. They both looked at me across the table.

"Art," said dad, "we think you can be depended on. We mortgaged the house today. You can have the money for your aeroplane."

Chapter IV

WHEN dad laid that $1,800 check on the table between us I felt for the first time a man's courage and strength. I knew I was going to fight, and win.

I realized what it meant to dad and mother to mortgage their home, with dad's sight growing less every day, and give the money to me, a fifteen-year-old boy, to use for an aeroplane. I knew, too, as surely as I do now, that I would make good and repay that money many times over.

It was a great moment for me.

Next morning I was almost too excited to work in the architect's office. About noon I went to see Mr. Weatherhogg. He was owner and manager of the firm, and just beginning to be known as a very successful architect.

Every boy has his hero, his ideal of a successful man. Mr. Weatherhogg was mine. It was because I knew he would have a better opinion of me if I did not drink that I never made friends with the boys who hung around the saloons. Of course, when I became interested in the aeroplane I was too busy to drink, and have been ever since.

"I am going to quit Saturday, Mr. Weatherhogg," I said, standing by his desk. He leaned back in his chair and looked at me.

"What's the trouble? Is it a matter of salary?" he asked.

"No, sir," I said, "I'm going to build an aeroplane."

"Build a WHAT?" he said, sitting up straight.

"An aeroplane, sir. I'm going to be an aviator," I said.

"Do you mean to say you can build an aeroplane, and make it fly?" he asked.

"Yes, sir," I said, confidently.

"How soon will you get it done?" he wanted to know.

"In about six weeks. I've ordered the engine," I answered.

Sometimes when I look back now I think that if I had not been absolutely ignorant of everything about aviation, and full of a boy's enthusiastic ideas, I never would have attempted the almost impossible things I did.

I could see that Mr. Weatherhogg did not believe I would succeed. He told me very cordially that I could have my job back at any time. On Saturday he came out to my desk to repeat it. That night I walked out of the office with my five-dollar check in my hand — the last of the family income. Dad was still doing all the work he could, but there was. nothing regular about his earnings.

I cleared out my old workshop in the barn, white-washed the windows" so nobody could watch me, and began work on the aeroplane. The whitewash on the windows was necessary, because I had a great invention in my mind. I was not only going to build a machine like that of the Wright brothers — I was going to improve on their ideas. I had a great idea for a stabilizer. When that stabilizer appeared all danger in flying was to be over. I would be not only rich, but famous.

Every part of that machine I drew with greatest care on paper, from pictures I had seen in the magazines, before I tried to begin the actual construction. Of course, I knew nothing of the engineering problems involved, the stresses, the shifting of the center of gravity, the balancing. I thought over every detail of that machine hundreds of times. I was quite sure it was going to fly.

Late that fall the Wright brothers gave an exhibition in Indianapolis. I hated to spare the money; I needed it for materials, but I felt I must see those machines. I saw them. I sat in the bleachers and saw those machines rise from the ground and fly.

I had no chance to examine the machines on the ground. But before my eyes they flew. They went perhaps 200 feet high, and landed, and rose again for another little flight. I felt sure my machine would do even more wonderful things when it was done.

I hurried back to my workshop in the barn, more confident than before. My six weeks had lengthened to three months, and still the machine was not finished. Every piece of wood used in an aeroplane must be air-dried, absolutely flawless, and tested in every possible way for strength. Every bit of wire must be tested. I used several hundred feet of wire — piano wire — on that first machine.

I scarcely swallowed my breakfast in the morning, T was so eager to get to the workshop. All day I worked. Al Wertman, my chum, helped me sometimes, and mother sewed the cloth for the planes on her sewing machine. I did all the rest of the work myself, except that dad helped with the sandpapering. I kept that for the evenings, and worked at it until I could not keep my eyes open any longer. Then I went to bed, asleep before I got there.

Aimee was allowed to see the engine when it came. All that summer I had seen her every day. After dad gave me the money for the aeroplane I had no time for anything but building it. I saw Aimee only on Sundays, and once in a while she came over, and she and mother watched me at work. Aimee did not mind my neglecting her for the aeroplane, she was excited about it almost as much as I was.

"Do you think it'll really fly, Art?" she asked me one day.

"Of course it will. You'll see me flying over your head just like that bird up at James Lake," I told her. I never doubted it.

The months went by, while I worked. I did nothing but work at the machine all that fall and winter. Through the worst of the cold weather I had a little stove in the barn. At noon mother came out with something hot for me to eat. I would not waste a minute that could be spent on the machine, for time was going fast, and dad had not been able to get the mortgage for longer than a year.

Hard as I worked, half of that year had gone by before I finished the aeroplane. I had built it every inch with my own hands, carefully tested every part, spent hours of hard thinking on every principle in its construction.

At last it was done, a Curtiss-type biplane, with a two-cycle, 40- horsepower Eldridge engine. It had only two wheels; I used wooden supports under the wings. On top and bottom the parts of my great invention, the stabilizer, stood out. To me it was the most beautiful thing in the world.

It was finished the 17th of January. That day I walked down town, enjoying the open air, and feeling more triumphant than I have ever felt since.

I had just $23 left of the money dad had given me, but the machine was finished. All that remained was to fly in it.