Glenn H. Curtiss

To the best of our knowledge, Glenn Hammond Curtiss never built a complete automobile in his life. So what's his biography doing in this space? We put it here because Curtiss was an American mechanical genius, a speed record holder of enormous repute, one of the United States' great trailblazers in early aviation, and he indirectly helped to invent motorized tourism in the great American land of sun and sand. Plus, the engines he designed and built ended up under the hoods of some wildly powerful but slightly nutty cars. Their existence qualifies Curtiss as one of the very first American hot rodders, a distinction that's not so out of joint with his status as a legend of flight.

Curtiss was born in Hammondsport, in the Finger Lakes region of New York, in 1878. By the time he reached his mid-teens, America was mesmerized by bicycling, not unlike today's reality about personal computers: Everybody, or so it seemed, had one. Bicycle racing was the NASCAR of its day and the young Curtiss was gripped powerfully by the sport. He remained a champion racer for years, and quickly branched out into designing and building bicycles of his own. From those early years, his expressed personal mission was to become the fastest man alive. Though originally employed as a camera assembler at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, Curtiss would soon be on his own, and by 1902, he had a bicycle shop with three employees. That was the year after he was stunned by seeing a Thomas Auto-Bi motorcycle at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, and in 1902, he was ready to attempt a motorcycle of his own, building his engine from raw Thomas block castings that he bought through ads in Scientific American magazine, and from a crude carburetor he cobbled from a discarded tomato can stuffed with steel wool.

Perhaps predictably, it didn't work very well. That same year, he founded the G.H. Curtiss Manufacturing Company and began to design and fabricate his own motorcycles under the brand name Hercules, using an in-house engine of his own design, a V-twin. The engine's development continued, and by 1906, Curtiss had managed to create a beastly two-wheeler with V-8 power, essentially by hooking four V-twins together in front-to-rear alignment. In January 1907, he throttled the monster along the cement-like sands of Ormond Beach, Florida, at 136.36 mph. From that moment, Curtiss became publicly lionized as the world's fastest man. His speed mark wasn't eclipsed by a car until 1911, by the great early racer Bob Burman driving the Blitzen Benz, and not by another motorcycle until 1930. But long before both of those record runs, aircraft had quickly captured Curtiss' fancy, a fascination that followed the Wright Brothers' historic flights of 1903.

His involvement in the new field of aviation forms the core of Curtiss' fame and legend today, and indirectly transferred to the automobile. While the Wrights were his longtime rivals, they made an early, critical mistake in that they conducted their first flights in secrecy, an arguable lapse in judgment that denied them their legitimate recognition for many years. In 1908, the A.E.A. plane dubbed Red Wing made the first public flight of a powered, pilot-controlled vehicle in U.S. history, with a flyboy named Casey Baldwin at the stick. The swiftly self-taught Curtiss got the call to fly its successor, the White Wing, covering a distance of 1,017 feet in horizontal flight. Using his newfound knowledge, Curtiss built an airplane of his own called the June Bug, and on July 4, 1908, flew it across Pleasant Valley in Hammondsport, covering a distance of nearly a mile, thereby winning a trophy from Scientific American in the first pre-announced, publicly conducted and officially recognized flight in American history.

Curtiss' subsequent career as both a competitive flyer and aeronautical engineer would make his name and reputation a household topic of discussion, and would make him forever famous. Founding the Curtiss Aeroplane Company in Buffalo in 1911, he would produce some 7,000 of the JN-4D "Jenny" trainers during World War II, and more than 15,000 aero engines. One of them was the OX-5, the first mass-produced aircraft engine in the United States. The water-cooled OHV V-8 produced 90hp from 503 cubic inches. While production lasted well beyond World War I, surplus OX-5s were seemingly everywhere after the armistice, available for a mere $50 and up. A racer named Ben Gregory was apparently the first to build a car powered by the huge OX-5. Glenn Curtiss then joined up with a small New York City firm, Prado, which built about 10 luxury cars powered by OX-5s. Another producer, Dallas-based Wharton, built at least one car with an OX-5 engine.

For a while, at least, Curtiss thought about building cars himself and, at his Long Island plant, OX-5s were transplanted into an engineer's 1910 Winton roadster and into a company-owned Marmon. Curtiss asked the designer Miles Harold Carpenter, who had been building the Phianna luxury car with OX-5 power in Queens, New York, to organize a new Curtiss Motor Car Company, but the recession of 1921 left it stillborn. By then, Curtiss had left manufacturing entirely, settling in Florida and developing the communities of Hialeah, Miami Springs and Opa-Locka in Dade County. He died July 23, 1930, aged 52, when a blood clot lodged in a coronary artery as he was undergoing surgery for appendicitis in Buffalo.