If you learned to fly with one of the Wright brothers, Orville or Wilbur, you could never fly with the other. Wilbur always sat in the left of the two seats in the front of their flimsy craft; Orville on the right. If you went up with Wilbur, you learned to work a lever at your right hand, to make the plane go up or down. Wilbur had one like it at his left. A third lever between the seats "warped" the wings, made the plane bank and, by a twist of the wrist, swung the rudder. Once you learned that, there was no use in going up with Orville because he would make you sit on the left where the levers were just reversed. Later, when they had more than one plane, each of the brothers developed his own system of control and neither man could fly with the other.
A little later came Glenn Curtiss with his method of pushing the aileran controls from side to side with the shoulders as an "instinctive" means of banking, and his wheel for steering. Bleriot used the Deperdussin method of operating the ailerons with a wheel mounted atop the elevator stick. Out of these and many more experiments came the singlestick control as it is almost universally used today.
The single control stick or "joystick" (named, by doubtful legend, after one Joyce) is a lever which the pilot moves fore & aft to nose the plane down or up; side to side to make the plane bank. All standard planes are operated by joystick, except transports and heavy cabin planes which have Deperdussin ("Dep"). (All planes are steered left & right by pedals.) In Washington last week the U. S. Court of Claims heard arguments of a Frenchman who alleges that every joystick built in the U. S. is an infringement on his patents.
The plaintiff, Robert Esnault-Pelterie, was one of the several aeronauts who sprang up in France immediately after the first triumph of the Wrights. Reputedly the sixth man in France to fly, he built an early plane known as the "R. E. P.", is sometimes credited with constructing the first cantilever monoplane (a wing without external bracing). Of recent years he has engaged chiefly in rocket researches, visited the U. S. last winter to address the Interplanetary Society and to seek money for his experiments which, he hopes, will some day result in a flight to the moon (TIME, Feb. 9).
In 1908 M. Esnault-Pelterie applied for a U. S. patent on what he now calls the singlestick control. The patent was issued in 1914, will expire Nov. 3 next. Seven years ago Esnault-Pelterie filed suit against the U. S. because planes used by Army & Navy had joy-sticks.* Also he sued Fairchild Airplane Manufacturing Co. and Chance-Vought Corp. for their commercial planes. The Fairchild com pany settled out of court this year. The Vought case is pending in New York. The claim against the Government lay dormant until recently when Claims Com missioner Hayner H. Gordon reopened the case. Should his claim be upheld. Inventor Esnault-Pelterie was reputedly pre pared to demand $2,500,000 royalties from the Government alone, untold sums from commercial builders in future suits.