“Mr. Curtiss is a friend of mine today,” said Baldwin, “and I have served in his companies as a director. But it is due to the Wrights as a simple matter of justice to have the story of the actual genesis of flight fully established.”
By that time, Captain Baldwin had abandoned the dirigible balloon for the airplane, and thus he, too, had been an infringer of the Wright patent. But as his public statements indicated, he showed an attitude quite different from that of most other infringers. Glenn Martin was another, like Baldwin, who acknowledged indebtedness to the Wrights.
After the Wrights had won their important suit against Curtiss in the Circuit Court of Appeals, Curtiss made no secret of the fact that he still hoped to find a possible loophole to get around the Wright patent. Since the decision of the Court enjoined him from using two ailerons operating simultaneously in opposite directions, he thought perhaps he could escape penalty by using just one aileron at a time, while the other remained inoperative. This, however, was covered by Claim 1 of the Wright patent, if the claim were given a liberal interpretation, as the Court had said the Wright Patent was entitled to, on account of the Wrights being the pioneers in the art of flying. But Claim 1 had not been cited in the former suits, and so had not as yet been adjudicated. If Curtiss could just show, or seem to show, in some way that the Wrights were not exactly pioneers, that some other machine capable of flight antedated the Wright machine, then he would be in a stronger position to defend himself against Claim 1 if it should be cited against him. Anticipating a suit, Curtiss took astounding means to prepare for combating it—as will appear.
But after all the evidence was taken in that case and just before the case was to come to trial, Orville Wright sold his interest in The Wright Co. to New York capitalists. Curtiss then contrived to gain delay after delay by approaching the new owners with proposals of settlement. These negotiations dragged on until the United States entered the First World War, and the Manufacturers Aircraft Association was organized for cross-licensing manufacturers who were building machines for the United States Government. Through this cross-licensing agreement, The Wright Co. received royalty on all planes manufactured for the Government. Consequently, this last case against Curtiss never came to trial.
The Wrights won their patent suits, too, in the highest courts of both Germany and France. The court in Germany made the comment in its oral decision that their discovery that a rear rudder was a balancing device rather than a steering device should entitle them to a basic patent.
Without going into too much detail about the various patent suits, the important point is that the priority of the Wright patents was sustained by the courts in both the United States and Europe. Every airplane that flies, in any part of the world, even today, does so by use of devices and discoveries first made by the Wright brothers.
These patent suits were a terrible ordeal for the attorneys and judges concerned, for aviation was so new that many of the technical terms were beyond the knowledge of nearly everyone. It was as if lawyers and judges had to learn a new language and take a course in the theoretical side of aeronautical engineering as they went along.
In a case against a foreign aviator, Wilbur Wright was called upon in Court to explain the function and operation of a rudder when an aeroplane is making a circle. Wilbur got hold of a piece of string and a fragment of chalk and went to a blackboard, where he made it clear to the Judge that when a machine is making a turn the pressure is on the opposite side of an aeroplane rudder from what it is on a ship’s or a dirigible’s rudder when they are making the same turn.
After the Judge had issued a temporary restraining order, at the end of the day’s proceedings, Clarence J. Shearn, attorney for the defendant, gloomily remarked: “If it hadn’t been for Wright and that damned piece of string, we would have won.”
One bit of testimony in another case was in regard to the accuracy of observations of men who fly airplanes. To show the inaccuracy of most people’s observations on phenomena having to do with physical laws, Wilbur used for illustration what a man thinks happens when riding a bicycle.