The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)

As early as 1912, forward-looking leaders in the United States, including people from the sci­entific, industrial, and government sectors, had attempted to create a center for the study and advancement of aviation. President Howard Taft appointed a group labeled the National Aerody­namical Laboratory Commission that year, but Congress voted down its funding. Most of the energy in aviation in America seemed to be spent on patent litigation between the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss.

By contrast, the countries of Europe were well ahead of the United States in aircraft research and development primarily due to their government-sponsored approach. The countries of France, Germany, Russia, and England all had government-funded agencies dedicated to the coordination of industry, scientific, and govern­ment efforts to advance aviation.

On the death of Samuel Langley, the Smithsonian Institution appointed Charles D. Walcott its Secretary in 1907. Although Walcott was a paleontologist, whose interest and previ­ous scientific efforts were far removed from aviation, he nevertheless took up the call to end aviation’s plight as an orphan of government. In collaboration with Congressional sponsors, he outlined a bill that was introduced into both houses of Congress in January 1915 to cre­ate an advisory committee patterned along the lines of the British Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt endorsed the idea and the legisla­tion was attached to the Naval Appropriations Bill. It provided funding in the grand amount of $5,000. The enabling legislation for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics slipped through practically unnoticed by opponents on March 3, 1915, and became law on the same day when signed by President Woodrow Wilson. The mission statement of the NACA reads: “It shall be the duty of the advisory committee for aeronautics to supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight with a view to their practical solution. ..”

The original committee was composed of 12 unpaid members selected from the military (Army and Navy), government (National Bureau of Standards, U. S. Weather Bureau, and Assis­tant Secretary of the Treasury), and academia (professors from Stanford, Columbia, Northwest­ern, and Johns Hopkins Universities). Walcott of the Smithsonian Institution became the commit­tee’s chairman.

The members soon began promoting the idea of a research laboratory and proposed a budget of $85,000 to fund their research. Against opposition, this amount was approved in August 1916 and led to the establishment of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Virginia. It soon became clear just how little was known in the United States about the science of aero­nautics, and there was a lot of wasted motion as the committee sought to find its way in uncharted waters. The first technical employee was an engineer selected from the Curtiss Aeroplane & Motor Corporation. Its first efforts centered on experimentation with propellers.

But there were as yet no representatives from business or industry involved in the pro­ceedings. It soon became clear that, if the work of the NACA was to advance, it would be necessary to have industry at the table as well as the gov­ernment and its scientific advisors from the halls of ivy. And it was not long before everyone real­ized that horsepower was driving the quest for superiority in the skies over Europe in 1916, and horsepower was beginning to be seen as the main requirement of any advance in aircraft evolution.

The automobile industry had been for some years the main authority in reciprocating engines in the United States, and automobile manufac­turers had naturally become the principal build­ers of aircraft engines as well. Since the United States was not a belligerent in the European war in 1916, American manufacturers had not been presented with any particular stimulus to drive innovation or improvements as their counterparts in Europe had been. America continued to fall behind.

Thus it was that all the major engine manu­facturers were invited to meet under the auspices of the NACA with military procurement offi­cials from the government in June 1916. The main question presented was, what was holding back competitive engine production in the United States?

Howard E. Coffin emerged as the chief industry spokesman during the NACA meetings in 1916. Coffin had built a steam-powered auto­mobile and designed his first internal combus­tion engine while studying engineering at the University of Michigan in 1899. By 1905, he was the chief engineer for the Olds Motor Works and later a vice president of the Hudson Motor Car Company. He was chiefly responsible for the standardization of parts in the automotive indus­try and became president of the Society of Auto­mobile Engineers. He had been appointed to the Naval Consulting Board in 1915, so he had seen the interaction between industry and the govern­ment from both sides.

Coffin showed that the relationship between industry and government was tied up in bureaucracy and red tape to the point that hardly anything beneficial or constructive could be accomplished. He said that the solution was to rely on engineering instead of bureaucracy, as had been demonstrated by the record of coop­eration between the automobile industry and the Society of Automobile Engineers. His words did not fall on deaf ears. The NACA had early on developed a system of appointing commit­tees to address specific problems that fell within its authority. The NACA established a Com­mittee on Motive Power that began to provide a venue where industry people and government representatives could meet, discuss, and work out specifications for what the government needed and wanted in aircraft engines. The automotive industry would then provide those engines.

Thus, the men at the NACA had been instru­mental in solving, or at least understanding and diminishing, the conflict that was preventing the cooperation necessary for the advancement of aeronautical science and industrial production in the United States. There was optimism all around and, in fact, this spirit of cooperation did ignite the creation of the Liberty engine, which would begin production within the year.

But interdisciplinary cooperation was only part of the problem. The question remained, “What was to be done about the stifling patent litigation?”

■ The Cross-Licensing Agreement

Patent law is akin to medieval French to the modern mind. It operates in mysterious ways to the uninitiated. Since the first airplane patent was issued to the Wright brothers in 1906, which covered the entire airplane, the Patent Office had granted numerous patents in the field of aero­nautics by the time World War I began. In spite of the issuance of the patent to the Wrights in 1906, and the ensuing litigation brought by the Wright brothers in 1909 against Glenn Curtiss for infringing their wing warping idea, the Patent Office on December 5, 1911 granted Curtiss and the other members of the AEA a patent for the idea of the aileron.

The Patent Office, as it were, has tunnel vision; it does not adjudicate rights that flow from patents, nor does it decide issues of infringement, the existence of prior art, or other defenses to lawsuits claiming patent infringe­ment. These issues are decided by the federal courts. The function of the Patent Office is to grant or refuse to grant patents.

One of the results of this confusing progres­sion of patent practice is that one patent may have the effect of “blocking” another patent, so that the holder of neither patent is able to move forward with the implementation of his ideas and incorporate them into practical products for pub­lic use without encountering claims of infringe­ment. It was this “blocking” of patents, along with the pervasive litigation that had sprung up because of it, that had been instrumental in ham­stringing innovative aircraft technology in the United States. This was a primary reason that there were no competitive American airplane designs and no engines powerful enough to par­ticipate in the war that was now raging in Europe.

By the spring of 1917, it looked increas­ingly likely that the United States was going to be drawn into the European war, yet its aircraft and engine production was paralyzed by patent litigation. Many in the United States feared for its defense in the new era of aviation warfare.

Wilbur Wright had died in 1912, and Orville Wright had assumed the presidency of the Wright Company and all its activities, including the engi­neering and manufacturing responsibilities of the company. He also continued to pursue the myriad lawsuits that he and his brother had initiated, almost as in memoriam to his deceased brother. But in 1915 Orville decided to move on. He bought up most of the outstanding shares of the Wright Company and then sold them to inves­tors in New York. In 1916, the Wright Company merged with the Glenn L. Martin Company and became known as Wright-Martin (see above).

Thus, the main problem confront­ing the NACA men in 1917 was the Wright – Martin Company, which had paid in excess of $1,000,000 for the 1906 Wright patent. At the end of 1916, Wright-Martin issued a notice that all aircraft manufacturers would be required to pay a royalty of 5 percent on every aircraft they sold, with a minimum annual royalty of $10,000 per manufacturer. This royalty structure was to be imposed on all aircraft manufactur­ers irrespective of the means of control used, wing warping or aileron control. By that time, of course, all aircraft manufacturers used ailerons for lateral control.

Further compounding the issue, Curtiss was now also demanding royalties for his several patents as they may apply to new aircraft. Many believed that Curtiss was forced into this practice as a self defensive move due to his significant attorneys’ fees and costs of litigation, but the result was that aircraft prices in the United States were becoming prohibitively costly. Lawsuits and threats of lawsuits were the most prominent feature of aeronautics in the USA. It was obvious that something had to be done, and it was going to have to be done by government.

Alternatives were discussed, including nationalization of the aircraft industry and the taking of the patents through the power of emi­nent domain. There was also another possibility: years earlier in a similar case in the automo­tive industry a cooperative arrangement had been agreed to between auto makers to resolve conflicting patent claims. This agreement had been made possible when Henry Ford broke the “Selden” patent. In that case a man named Selden claimed a patent on the entire automobile, not unlike the Wright brothers with the airplane, but the celebrated patent attorney, W. Benton Crisp, had prevailed in the infringement case brought by Selden against Henry Ford.

W. Benton Crisp had later represented Howard E. Coffin (who was now head of the NACA) in the Hudson crankshaft case. Through the influence of Henry Ford, Crisp now repre­sented Glenn Curtiss against the Wright patent. Reluctantly, Wright-Martin was beginning to see the logic in compromise.

Under the proposal, all aircraft and parts manufacturers would join an association to be known as the Aircraft Manufacturers Associ­ation. For each aircraft produced, the manu­facturer would pay a modest sum into the Association, which amount would be shared by

Wright-Martin, the Curtiss organization, and the Association. The effect of the cross-licensing agreement was that the aviation manufacturing industry would produce aircraft without regard to patents, subject to the modest stipends men­tioned, and all ideas, practices, techniques, and procedures would be shared between the mem­bers. Aircraft engines were excepted from the Agreement.

Although the Agreement soon came under criticism from some aircraft manufacturers on grounds of favoritism (of Wright-Martin and Curtiss) and on antitrust principles, the cross­licensing agreement is considered one of the outstanding contributions of the NACA during World War I. Even though the Agreement had a proposed limited lifespan, no patent litigation relating to the original aircraft patents was ever revived.

The National Advisory Committee for Aero­nautics (NACA) in 1958 became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).