Glenn Curtiss, the Fastest Man on Earth, and the Motorcycle Racer Who Flew the June Bug and Then Taught the Navy to Land on a Ship

Glenn Hammond Curtiss was an American engine builder and aviation pioneer who set a land-speed record of 136 miles per hour on a motorcycle in 1907, earning the title “Fastest Man on Earth.” He went on to fly the first public, prize-winning airplane flight in America, invent the practical flying boat, pioneer the aileron, and sell the U.S. Navy its first-ever aircraft. Though history often remembers him only as the man the Wright brothers sued, Curtiss shaped nearly every corner of modern flight.

Who Was Glenn Curtiss?

Curtiss came out of Hammondsport, New York, a small town at the foot of one of the Finger Lakes in the state’s wine country. He wasn’t a scholar - he was a tinkerer. He started as a Western Union bicycle messenger, then opened his own bicycle shop, a biography that echoes another pair of bicycle men from Dayton, Ohio.

The speed bug bit him early. Bicycles turned into motorcycles because Curtiss figured he could build a better engine than anyone was selling him. That is the key to understanding the man: he was an engine builder first. The airplanes, the flying boats, all of it grew from one fact - Glenn Curtiss could make a light, powerful, reliable motor when almost no one else in America could.

The Fastest Man on Earth

In January 1907, on the hard-packed sand at Ormond Beach, Florida, Curtiss crouched over a motorcycle he had built himself, with an eight-cylinder aircraft engine strapped to the frame - an engine he’d designed to sell to the men trying to fly. He pointed it down the beach and opened it up.

He hit 136 miles per hour.

For the next several years, no one on Earth - on land, on water, or in the air - went faster. The newspapers crowned him “The Fastest Man on Earth.” And he was just getting started.

How the Aerial Experiment Association Launched His Flying Career

That engine-building talent put Curtiss in remarkable company. In 1907, Alexander Graham Bell - the telephone inventor - was in Nova Scotia, obsessed with the problem of flight. Bell had money, brains, and a group he’d assembled called the Aerial Experiment Association (AEA). What he needed were good, light engines, and everyone pointed him to the motorcycle man in Hammondsport.

Bell brought Curtiss into the AEA, and that group of five men set out to build flying machines - and they did it in the open, in full public view. That detail matters enormously to what came next.

Did Glenn Curtiss Fly Before the Wright Brothers?

No. The Wright brothers flew first, at Kitty Hawk in 1903 - a full five years earlier. But on July 4, 1908, at Hammondsport, Curtiss climbed into an AEA biplane called the June Bug and flew it more than a kilometer in a straight line, winning the Scientific American Trophy.

The difference was visibility. Curtiss flew in public - in front of a crowd, newspapermen, a representative of the Aero Club, and an official holding a stopwatch. The Wrights, by contrast, had been secretive, making their breakthrough on a lonely North Carolina dune with almost no one watching, then guarding it closely for fear it would be stolen. For years afterward, many Americans genuinely doubted the Wrights had flown at all; some newspapers called them bluffers.

So when a motorcycle racer flew down “the main street of the sky” on Independence Day and collected a trophy for it, a large share of the American public believed Glenn Curtiss was the first man they had ever actually seen fly.

What Was the June Bug?

The June Bug was a canvas-and-spruce biplane, its wings doped a bright yellow - the color of a ripe ear of corn, which is where the name came from. There was no cockpit to speak of. The pilot sat right out on the leading edge of the bottom wing, feet on a bar, exposed to the wind, with the engine chattering behind his shoulders and throwing a fine mist of castor oil back into his face. No brakes. No meaningful instruments. You steered with your whole body and your nerve - and a man who had already faced down 136 mph on a beach had exactly the nerve for it.

But the June Bug carried something far more important than yellow paint: ailerons.

Ailerons vs. Wing Warping: The Wright Brothers Lawsuit

Ailerons are the hinged surfaces near the wingtips that roll an airplane left and right - the control every pilot uses on every bank, on every aircraft flying today. The Wrights didn’t use them. They rolled their airplanes by physically warping the entire wing, twisting the trailing edge with cables. Wing warping worked, but it strained the structure and didn’t scale up.

Bell’s group and Curtiss went a different way: small, hinged movable surfaces. That single idea is the direct ancestor of the roll control used on virtually every airplane today.

The Wright brothers looked at those ailerons and called them nothing more than wing warping with hinges - and they sued. The Wright v. Curtiss patent battle dragged through the courts for years, drained money from both camps, and turned two brilliant sets of American inventors into bitter enemies. Many historians argue it set back American aviation so badly that when World War I arrived, the United States was flying French and British designs - because its own inventors had spent a decade fighting in court instead of building airplanes.

How Glenn Curtiss Invented the Flying Boat

Rather than be tied down by lawsuits, Curtiss went where the Wrights weren’t looking: the water. He reasoned that the whole planet is covered in water, so why fight over small patches of ground? If an airplane could land on water, the entire world became a runway.

The engineering was harder than it sounds. Water grabs and sucks a hull down. The trick is getting the hull to break free and skim across the surface instead of plowing through it - the moment pilots still call “getting up on the step.” Curtiss and his men solved it with a hull shape featuring a notch, or “step,” in the bottom that let the water release cleanly.

By 1911 and 1912, he had a true flying boat - an airplane that rested on its own hull like a boat and flew off open water. Suddenly you didn’t need a runway, just a lake, river, harbor, or calm stretch of sea. Much of the bush flying that opened up Alaska and Canada traces straight back to what Curtiss worked out on the Finger Lakes. Every floatplane at a northern dock this morning is, in a sense, his grandchild.

How Glenn Curtiss Founded U.S. Naval Aviation

In 1910, the U.S. Navy had no air arm and no airplane. Most admirals dismissed the flying machine as a circus stunt; the battleship was king. But a few younger officers had a hunch, and Curtiss - a salesman as much as an inventor - saw his opening.

First flight off a ship (November 1910): A Curtiss pilot named Eugene Ely flew a Curtiss airplane off a wooden platform built over the bow of the cruiser USS Birmingham. His wheels dipped and kissed the water on the way off, but he caught it, climbed away, and flew to the beach - the first person ever to fly an airplane off a ship.

First landing on a ship (January 1911): Ely completed the other half aboard the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay. The crew rigged a platform on the stern and strung ropes weighted with sandbags, fitted with hooks to catch hooks mounted under Ely’s airplane. Ely descended, aimed for the deck, caught the arresting ropes, jerked to a stop, and climbed out grinning.

Every carrier trap landing since - every tailhook, every arresting wire - descends directly from what Curtiss and Ely proved in San Francisco Bay in 1911.

Curtiss then took a flying boat to San Diego and taught himself to land alongside the Pennsylvania, be hoisted aboard by the ship’s crane, and lowered back down to take off again - proving a battleship could carry its own eyes in the sky.

What Was the U.S. Navy’s First Airplane?

In 1911, the Navy ordered its first airplane from Glenn Curtiss: the Triad, designated the A-1. He called it the Triad because it operated from land, from water, and in the air. The A-1 was the first aircraft the United States Navy ever owned. Curtiss also established a flying school at North Island, San Diego, where he trained the Navy’s first pilots - ground still called the birthplace of naval aviation.

The NC-4: First Aircraft to Cross the Atlantic

World War I forced the flying boat to grow up fast. The Navy needed to hunt submarines far out over the Atlantic, and Curtiss delivered a line of large patrol flying boats. The largest was the NC boat - “Navy Curtiss.”

In 1919, the Navy attempted the first-ever crossing of the Atlantic by air, sending three of the big four-engine flying boats. The one that made it was numbered four: the NC-4. In May 1919, it crossed the Atlantic by way of Newfoundland, the Azores, and Portugal - the first aircraft of any kind to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

It wasn’t nonstop. The crew hopped across, aided by a line of Navy destroyers strung across the ocean like streetlights to help them navigate. That’s why, eight years later, Charles Lindbergh’s solo nonstop New York-to-Paris flight in 1927 is the one the world remembers. But a Curtiss flying boat crossed that ocean first - and every man aboard came home.

Why Glenn Curtiss Deserves to Be Remembered

Add it up. Glenn Curtiss was the fastest man on earth on a motorcycle he built. He flew America’s first public, prize-winning flight. He gave us the aileron. He invented the flying boat. He put the first airplane off a ship and the first airplane onto a ship. He sold the U.S. Navy its first aircraft and trained its first pilots. And his airplane was the first to cross the Atlantic.

For most of the last century, the Wright brothers got the statues, the stamps, and the schoolbook chapters, while Curtiss was remembered - if at all - as the rival the Wrights sued. Yet his fingerprints are on nearly the whole enterprise of flight: the floatplane getting up on the step, the jet catching the wire on a carrier deck, and the roll of the yoke on every ramp in the world.

Key Takeaways

Glenn Curtiss set a 136 mph motorcycle land-speed record in 1907, earning the title “Fastest Man on Earth.”
He flew the June Bug to win the Scientific American Trophy on July 4, 1908 - America’s first public, prize-winning flight - and pioneered the aileron, which triggered a years-long patent war with the Wright brothers.
Curtiss invented the practical flying boat (1911–1912), enabling floatplane and bush aviation worldwide.
He founded U.S. naval aviation: Eugene Ely’s first flight off a ship (1910) and landing on a ship (1911), and the Navy’s first airplane, the Curtiss A-1 Triad (1911).
The Curtiss NC-4 became the first aircraft to cross the Atlantic in May 1919, eight years before Lindbergh’s solo flight.