Aviation Pioneer, Glenn Curtis.

This month the featured aviation pioneer is Glenn Curtiss. Glen’s contribution to early aviation was enormous. Glen was born in Hammondsport, New York in 1876 and had a limited education.
At an early age Glen developed a strong interest in machines and inventions, and his abilities in these areas more than compensated for his lack of formal qualifications. His first known invention was a stencil machine for the Eastman Dry Plate Company (Eastman Kodak) where he worked for a short time after leaving school.
  After leaving Eastman Glenn worked for Western Union as a bicycle messenger. His hobby was bike racing. This developed to the stage where he opened his own bike shop and started making bicycles.
In 1998 Glenn Married his wife Lena, and shortly after, when lightweight engines became available Glen moved into manufacturing motorcycles under the famous Hercules brand and then into manufacturing his own engines. By this time he was a well known motorcycle racer. Among other achievements he held the world speed record over one kilometre of 64 mph (1903) and in 1907 set a world speed record 136.36 mph on a V8 powered motorcycle.

  At this time Glenn's company Hercules Motor Cycles was one of the leading manufacturers of high speed motorcycles. Among other innovations Glen invented the handle bar throttle control for motorcycles.

Glenn’s entry into aviation came about because of his success
in manufacturing powerful lightweight engines for his motorcycles. In 1904 Tom Baldwin built the first dirigible in America call the California Arrow. It was powered by one of Glenn’s V twin motorcycle engines. It was in a Baldwin Dirigible that Glenn Curtiss took his first flight.
The success of the Curtiss engine in Baldwins dirigible led to Alexander Graham Bell asking Glenn to provide engines for his heavier than air flight experiments, and then in 1907 to Bell asking Glen to join his Aerial Experimental Association. Glenn also tried to sell engines to the Wright brothers but    they where not interested.
The original driving force for the Aerial Experimental Association (AEA) was not Alexander Graham Bell but is wife Mabel, who injected twenty thousand dollars start up capital into the venture.
Among the original members of AEA was Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, who had been assigned by the War Ministry to follow the progress of the experiments.
One of the early problems identified was how to control AEA aircraft without infringing the Wright brother's patents on wing warping.
The Wright brothers did not invent flying. How to fly had been know by the popular explanation derived from  Daniel Bernoulli in his book Hydrodynamica  published in 1738. The Bernoulli explanation of lift being derived from air traveling faster over the curved surface to catch up with the air traveling across the bottom is not correct, but it does as a working hypothesis and is sufficient to explain flight.
The Problem of flight was twofold. The first was like the situation existing today. We know how to ‘fly’ to Mars but the hardware isn’t available yet. The second problem was that of control.
Pitch control was easy. Yaw control was easy, but controlling roll was difficult. What the Wright brothers did was invent a way of
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