In this age of deregulated, worldwide passenger flight with more commercial airlines in the game than there are countries in the world (or so it seems anyway), its interesting to reflect that back in 1906 two American brothers had a monopoly on the very concept of human flight. Of course in 1906 there was no commercial flights – being still at the first dawn of aviation endeavour, but the only attempts at flight at all then (in a legal sense at least) were with the express say-so of those same two brothers.

In 1906 the Wright brothers – Orville and Wilbur – were granted a patent by the US Patent Office (after two earlier failed applications) for their “flying machine”, or more precisely, for their demonstrated method of controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight. The bicycle shop owners-cum-aviation inventors had managed to demonstrate some measure (albeit minimal) of aerial control of the third version of their Wright flyer in all three axes of aerodynamics – pitch, yaw and roll[1]. The basis of the patent was the Wrights’ experiments in 1902-1903 and the successful (852 feet/59 seconds) glider flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903.

⇓ 1903 Wright Flyer at the Smithsonian

The Wright brothers defended their exclusive aircraft patent against all-comers (“copiers and imitators” as they saw everybody else in the game) with a monomaniacal religious zeal that would have befitted their overbearing United Brethren minister father Milton. Orville and Wilbur freely sued and issued writs against anyone who attempted to construct and fly a new aircraft without purchasing a licence from them. As this was the pioneering era of aviation there were a lot of inventors trying to do just this[2]. Accordingly, the Wrights spent a lot of time locked in legal disputes with other manufacturers in America and overseas who were trying to avoid the patent fee. The Wrights staunchly defended their world monopoly over flight in unequivocal terms as a ‘moral’ and a ‘legal’ right, treating all other contemporary inventors in the field as in effect “hobbyists”![3].

Glenn Hammond Curtiss, a New York engineer and aviator, was one of many inventors who fell foul of the litigious Wright brothers when he added ailerons (French: “little wing”), a movable attachment to a fixed wing for greater control, to his experimental aircraft. Unfortunately for Curtiss he became the main focus of the Wrights’ wrath and in their eyes their greatest nemesis … in 1913 the Wrights won lawsuits for patent infringement against Curtiss et al, when US courts ruled that ailerons fell under the ambit of the Wright patent. Consequently Curtiss and his business partners (Aerial Experiment Association – AEA) were forced into bankruptcy[4].

The Wrights’ broad litigious reach was generally less effectively outside of the USA. Many European inventors were able to escape paying the patent fees, sometimes with the aid of sympathetic European courts. The Wrights’ demands for royalties were ignored or evaded, or if they were contested, one strategy was to stretch the case out until the patents had expired[5].

The Wright brothers’ obsession with enforcing their legal patent❈ had wider ramifications for the industry to the point of retarding progress in the development of US aviation. Beyond the early breakthroughs in lateral control, the brothers did not really add much to their aviation achievements (consequently in these years Curtiss pulled far ahead of them in design innovation). After America entered the Great War in 1917, the brothers’ perversely rigorous enforcement of the patents left America woefully short of new airplanes at a time they were desperately needed. The upshot was that the US forces in WWI had to secure French fighter planes for their military pilots[6].

Because of the Wrights’ unwavering stance on their patents (after 1912 Orville alone, as Wilbur died that year), resentment towards the brothers was strong, they were accused of being greedy by licensees, eg, by demanding “money first” from prospective buyers BEFORE giving a demonstration of the prototype flyer, or by setting too high a royalty fee (at one point demanding 20% of sales); after a string of fatal air crashes in Wright planes Orville Wright lost sympathy with the public by attributing the accidents solely to “pilot error” (characteristically giving no consideration to the fact that the Wrights might be at fault for not having tried to make improvements to their prototype Flyer’s basic design[7].

Eventually, inevitably, the US authorities moved to close down the Wrights’ monopoly. A patent pool system was introduced in 1917 whereby all aircraft manufacturers in the country joined an association requiring the payment of a relatively small fee for patent use. The pooling of the aircraft patents signalled the end of the Wrights’ patent wars … by this time Orville had already sold his interest in the Wright Company at handsome profit and moved on to other (non-aviation) ventures[8].

PostScript: Curtiss-Wright parallels

Intriguingly, Curtiss shared a common background with the brothers Wright, like them he began as a bicycle shop owner, designing, building and repairing bikes in small-town USA. But before moving into aviation Curtiss excelled in another area, motorcycles … he began designing V-8 powered motorcycles. The adventurous Curtiss even raced them, winning several races and setting a world record speed of 136 mph (earning himself for a brief period the tag of “the fastest man on earth”).

Despite the early setbacks at the hands of the Wrights, Curtiss went on to have a stellar career in aviation (and in naval aviation), designing practical seaplanes and airplanes, the viability of which he happily demonstrated in public (cf. the Wrights who tended to shroud their aircraft projects in secrecy). With financial backing from the famous inventor Alexander Graham Bell and from Bell’s wife, Curtiss’ international prize-winning planes (“The June Bug”, “The Albany Flyer”, “The Jenny”) completed the first publicly witnessed flight and the first long distance flight in North America (220 km, Albany to New York City). Curtiss, far superior to the Wrights as a pragmatic, go-ahead businessman, quickly became a multimillionaire. Curtiss possessed a flair for publicising and promoting his inventions that the brothers did not exhibit, and turned his inventions into rapid sales of units[9]. In a superb irony given Orville’s fierce, lifelong antipathy to Glenn Curtiss, the two aviation companies eventually merged in 1929❦ to form the Curtiss-Wright Corporation[10].

◖◗ See also the related November 2014 blog article ‘Wright or Not Right?: the Controversy over who really was “First in Flight?” ‘

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❈ the stock joke the Curtiss people liked to tell at the time went … (the two brothers were so litigious that) every time somebody jumped in the air and waved his arms, the Wrights would demand a patent royalty or threaten to sue!
❦ by which time neither man had active roles in their respective companies any longer … Notwithstanding that Orville still objected to the new corporation’s title listing Curtiss’ name first!

[1] activating the pitch (moving the aircraft’s nose up and down) and yaw (moving the nose side-to-side) of the projectile was the previous, understood (but unsuccessful) method of controlling flight … the Wrights reasoned that these worked only in unison with the third element of rotation, roll (lateral movement through the novel wing-warping feature of the Flyer). Warping (twisting) of part of the wing on either side causes the plane to roll or bank in that direction, Phaedra Hise, ‘The 1903 Wright Flyer’, Air & Space Magazine (Smithsonian), March 2003. The addition of twin-rudders to the rear of the 1902 model of the Flyer helped stabilise it and prevent it spinning out of control, ‘Rudder – Yaw (Wright 1903 Flyer)’, (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), www.wright.nasa.gov
[2] as W J Boyne described it, the Wrights went about “systematically sueing anyone suspected of infringing their patents, which really meant everyone attempting to make a living from building or flying airplanes”, Walter J Boyne’s “World Aviation History”, (‘The Wright Brothers: The Other Side of the Coin’), 2008, www.wingsoverkansas.com
[3] Sparks of Invention: Need for Speed, (Series 1, episode 5, TV documentary 2015, 9-NOW Network, screened 23-Oct-2016); ‘Wilbur Wright to Octave Chanute’, (letter, Dayton, Oh. 20-Jan-1910), cited in ‘Wright Brothers patent war’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org
[3] ibid.
[4] ‘Wright Brothers patent wars’, ibid.
[5] ibid.
[6] ibid.
[7] Boyne, op.cit.; Phaedra Hise, ‘How the Wright Brothers Blew It’, Forbes, 19-Nov-2003, www.forbes.com
[8] Wright Brothers patent wars’, op.cit.
[9] ‘About the Man – Glenn H. Curtiss’, Glenn H. Curtiss Museum, www.glennhcurtissmuseum.org
[10] Flying (magazine), ‘Century of Flight’, 130(12), Dec 2003