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Luckily
for the Wright Brothers this famous photo and the presence of uninvolved
witnesses from the near-by Lifeboat Station helped provide them with
documentation of their famed Kitty Hawk flight.
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For
Americans it is a matter of settled fact
that the Wright Brothers achieved
the first manned powered flight by a heavier than air craft on December 17,
1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. But around the world there are other contenders and claimants. One was nearly 3
years tardy, some of the claimants
were fraudulent, and others never really
got off the ground at all. Others did
manage to get airborne, however
briefly, mostly clustered within five years of the Wright accomplishment. Much, it turns out, depends on exactly what
your definition of a successful powered flight is. And on your national pride. The Russians and Brazilians have never admitted that their favorite sons did not
make the first flight.
Part
of the blame for the confusion rests with the Wrights themselves. Fearful of competitive efforts and possible patent infringement, after tersely wiring their father in Dayton, Ohio to simply “notify the press.”
After a demonstration flight failed
in May 1904, the Wrights did not further publicize their work or show it
publicly until they made subsequent design improvements allowing for greater pilot control, flight duration, and altitude. In Wright Flyer III they finally
could demonstrate sustained flight—a 39-minute, 24-mile circling flight on
October 5, 1905. Their patents were
granted in 1906 and in 1908 for the first time the two brothers undertook marketing tours in the U.S. and Europe. Other inventors were either totally unaware
of the Wright’s achievement and were working completely independently, or
asserted that the Wright 1903 flight was either not substantiated or did not meet the criteria for sustained, controllable flight.
The
Wright’s known chief competitor was Samuel Pierpont Langley, the Secretary
of the Smithsonian Institution, who
obtained a contract from the War Department to develop a practical
aircraft in 1896. He had already built and flown model gliders with a miniature steam engine for propulsion. Over the next few years he attempted to build
an aircraft capable of carrying a human
being. Because of his high profile
and the fact that he conducted experiments in the heavily populated Washington, D.C. area his work attracted
wide attention in the press which assumed it was only a matter of time until he
would succeed. By 1903 he had built a
full scale aircraft powered by an internal
combustion engine dubbed the Aerodrome,
which he launched by catapult from a
barge on the Potomac River in two tests on October 7 and 8 of that year. Both tests
failed, after which Langley did not attempt manned flight again. Langley died on February 27, 1906 at the age
of 71 without having achieved his dream.
None
the less, for years the Smithsonian championed the cause of their former head
while denigrating the claims of the Wright Brothers. In 1914 they hired the Wright’s bitter rival
Glenn Curtis to tinker with a Langley model.
After significant modification he was able to get it in the air for a
fight of a few hundred feet. Afterward
they had to settle for a claim that Langley had been the first to build “the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free
flight.” The Wrights objected to this
evasive claim and warred with the Institution until they trumped it by agreeing
to allow the Flyer to be exhibited there only with the acknowledgement that
it was, indeed first.
The
earliest claimant was Frenchman Félix du Temple who had earlier done
pioneering work on steam propelled dirigible
built a steam monoplane that left
the ground with a sailor on board as
more or less a passenger. In 1874 it was in the air for a short
distance, but the feat was not duplicated.
Moreover its launch was gravity
assisted going off a small cliff after rolling downhill to pick up
speed. At most it can claim to be the
first aircraft to take off under power.
In
1884 the Russian Alexander F. Mozhaiski launched
a craft down a steep inclined ramp which
seemed to stay in the air for a bit while making forward progress. But because the wings of his monoplane did
not have the curvature necessary to create lift
modern aeronautical engineers believe
that the ship only avoided sinking like a stone because the acceleration off
the ramp made up for his underpowered engine and the wings simply braked his
fall. However during the Soviet era, authorities aggressively asserted
Mozhaiski’s claim and in Russia alone today he is credited with the first
manned flight.
In
1890 Clément Ader built a bat-winged monoplane with a tractor—front mounted—propeller that
took off from level ground for a short
hop. But experts believe the hop was
too short to qualify as flight and it was also uncontrolled by the
passenger. After others demonstrated successful
aircraft in the new Century, Adder
did his cause and reputation no good
by making exaggerated and outright false claims of having achieved longer
flight.
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| Gustave Whitehead and daughter pose with his Number 21 on the ground in a 1901 issue of Scientific American. |
The
most controversial of the early claimants was German born Gustav Weisskopf who adopted the name Gustave Whitehead after immigrating to the United States. He was working on heavier than air craft in
the 1890’s. A former collaborator, Louis Darvarich, made a claim that the
two of them built a steam powered air craft in 1899 that they got off the
ground in Pittsburgh’s Schenley Park
in April or May and flew for nearly
half a mile before crashing into the side of a building. Whitehead himself never claimed that event
nor was it otherwise documented. Even if
it had occurred it would have been classified as an apparently uncontrolled
hop.
More
seriously in 1901 and 1902 Whitehead himself claimed to have achieved
flight. On August 14, 1901 the Bridgeport
Herald in Connecticut reported that Whitehead piloted his bat winged Number
21 aircraft in a controlled powered flight for about half a mile, reaching
a height of 50 feet, and landed safely.
That would have bettered the Wright’s Kitty Hawk flight. The article was accompanied by a drawing of
the air craft which was supposedly based on a photograph that has never been
located. The plane looked suspiciously
like a previously circulated drawings of Ader’s 1890 craft. Other press accounts picked up the Herald story.
In
January of 1902 Whitehead claimed to have made two flights over Long Island, New York in his flyer Number
22 which featured a more powerful internal combustion engine of his own
design and a tubular aluminum instead
of bamboo frame. One flight was said to have gone three
miles and the second, seven miles with the airplane landing in the water using
its boat-like fuselage—another first,
if true. Whitehead publicized his
claims, which were picked up in several newspapers but no independent witnesses
were ever found to attest to them. The Scientific American published an
article in 1903 in which Whitehead described his experiments with unmanned
powered flight employing modified gliders, but made no mention of the manned
flight.
In
the next two years Whitehead seemed to return to glider experiments and to
refining his engine. In a 1904 St. Louis exposition he showed his
engine and one of his gliders on a ground display. The brochure for the show casually mentioned
Whitehead as being among those who had achieved powered flight but provided no
details. Whitehead continued to tinker
with engines and gliders, even providing an engine for a helicopter prototype built and flown on a tether Lee Burridge of the Aero Club of America. But he
worked in obscurity supporting himself as a factory laborer and mechanic
until he died of a heart attack
in 1927.
Whiteheads
claims of flight were occasionally mentioned in aviation articles in the ‘30’s
and ‘40’s but attracted little attention until a photograph was found in 1963
by Air Force Reserve Major William O’Dwyer
in which he identified a photo hanging on a background wall as a shot of
Whitehead piloting a flying machine. On
the basis of this books were written and in 2013 Scientific American backed Whitehead’s claim of first flight. Unfortunately less than three month after
that article advanced analysis of O’Dwyer’s picture showed that the wall photo
was a known photo of one of Whitehead’s glider flights. Over the years investigators found witnesses
claiming to have seen the Philadelphia and especially the Bridgeport
flights. Other photos were reported seen
but have vanished or been lost.
Whitehead still has his staunch advocates, but most experts do not find
enough proof to strip the Wright Bros of their claims.
The
most well-known alternate claimant was Brazilian
born Alberto Santos-Dumont who had a solid reputation in France for his
work with lighter than air craft. On October 23, 1906 he flew his 14-bis biplane, which resembled a box kite for 197 feet at a height of
about of about 15 feet which was officially observed and verified by the Aéro-Club de France winning the Deutsch-Archdeacon Prize for the first
officially-observed flight of more than 25 meters. A second flight on November 12 covered 772 and
was observed by the newly-formed Fédération
Aéronautique Internationale (FAI)
and became the first record in their log book.
As
far as the Europeans—and Brazilians were concerned, this was the first
flight. The regarded the Wright Brother’s
claim as unsubstantiated or dismissed it as uncontrolled. In 1908 Wilber
Wright arrived in Europe for his demonstration tour with a vastly improved
and reliable Flyer capable of far exceeding what Santos-Dumont had
demonstrated. The French were forced to
re-evaluate the Wright claims and eventually the FAI acknowledged their primacy
but gave Santos-Dumont claim to the first flight in Europe. Brazil, however, still officially claims the
glory of first flight for their native son and cannot be dissuaded otherwise.
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| Rare, undated Richard Pearse photo. |
There
were other tinkerers in this period who may, or may not, had achieved powered
hops. The most interesting of these was Richard Pearse. Pearse was born on December 3, 1877 in
rural New Zealand and was a farmer.
He was also the quintessential tinker and had been granted patents for bicycle with vertical crank gears and self-inflating
tires. In 1901, working without knowledge
or contact with world-wide efforts, Pearse began to build aircraft. It featured a primitive two-cycle engine mounted
on a tricycle undercarriage over
which was a linen-covered bamboo wing. It included rudimentary controls—ailerons—and a vertical stabilizer and
rudder mounted to the rear. The engine powered
a front tractor propeller. Although the
wing lacked the curvature of a true airfoil, this machine was actually much
closer to the future of aviation that was the Wright flyer, a bi-plane with a pusher engine, front mounted stabilizers,
and control by the dead-end technology of wing
warping.
Pearse
evidently made his first attempts at flight in 1901 but his engine was not
powerful enough for more than the briefest hops. He went to work on an entirely new engine, a
light weight marvel that incorporated double-ended
cylinders with two pistons each. On March 31, 1903 Pearse took off and was in
the air for “several hundred meters” although he struggled for control and
crashed into a hedge at the end of the field.
The modest Pearse made no claim to a first flight noting in a later press
interview that he had made a powered take-off, “but at too low a speed for
controls to work.”
He
continued to make improvements in his flyer, which was amazingly similar to
modern ultra-light kite aircraft, and made at least two
more flight—or hops—that year. In the last one, on May 11, he took off along
the side of the Opihi River near the
the town of Temuka, turned left to
fly over the 30 foot tall river-bank,
then turned right to fly parallel to the middle of the river. After flying
nearly 1,000 yards, his engine began to overheat and lost power, forcing a
landing in the almost dry riverbed.
These
early attempts were not publicized in the press. Nor did Pearse try to make public claims. He did get patents on his innovations but
made no efforts to make them commercially viable. He continued experiments
until moving to a hilly area near Christchurch
in 1911 which made his experiments to difficult to continue. During World War II he privately experimented
with an auto-gyro type contraption
which
involved a tilting rotor and
monoplane wings, which, along with the tail, could fold to allow storage in a garage. Pearse intended the vehicle for
driving like a car as well for flying.
As
he grew older Pearse became paranoid that
spies were out to steal his ideas. He
was eventually confined to Sunnyside
Mental Hospital in Christchurch where he died, mostly forgotten, on July
29, 1953.
Pearse’s
reputation and claim got a boost in 1963 when researches working on a tip that
Pearse had cleaned out his barn in 1911 at the time of his move and put most of
his equipment in a local dump, retrieved
components of his engine, including cylinders made from cast-iron drainpipes. That
allowed working models of the engine to be built which were shown to be 15
horsepower (hp), more than enough to get a craft as light as his off the ground.
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| A model of Pearse's airplane in the South Canturbury Musem in New Zealand. |
As
he grew older Pearse became paranoid that
spies were out to steal his ideas. He
was eventually confined to Sunnyside
Mental Hospital in Christchurch where he died, mostly forgotten, on July
29, 1953.
Pearse’s
reputation and claim got a boost in 1963 when researches working on a tip that
Pearse had cleaned out his barn in 1911 at the time of his move and put most of
his equipment in a local dump, retrieved
components of his engine, including cylinders made from cast-iron drainpipes. That
allowed working models of the engine to be built which were shown to be 15
horsepower (hp), more than enough to get a craft as light as his off the ground.
Kiwis are proud of their pioneer. A model of his 1903 craft hangs in the South Canterbury Museum, a monument
stand near the site of the original flights, and Pearse has been honored on postage. But as modest as Pearse himself, the country
makes no grandiose claims of first flight or challenges the Wright’s
place.
The
Russians and Brazilians could take a hint from them.
