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| Luckily for the Wright Brothers this famous photo and the presence of un-involved witnesses from the near-by Lifeboat Station helped provide them with documentation of their famed Kitty Hawk flight. |
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. some 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 are. 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” they clammed up about their experiments. 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. 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 A steam propelled dirigible. He 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.
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| This postal cover celebrates Alexander F. Moshaiski and his 1884 steam powered aircraft which the Russians alone celebrate as the first manned powered flight. |
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 posed with his daughter and his Condor No. 21 in the spring of 1901. Note the bat wings, dual front mounted propellers, and boat-like body for landing on water. |
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 aircraft 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 aircraft 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 the 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 by 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.
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| Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont flew his 14-bis biplane in France in October of 1906 at first claimed in Europe as the first flight. That designation was revoked and the Wright Bros. primacy acknowledged by all but the Brazilians who feature a model of the plane in their elaborate 2016 Rio Olympic Games opening ceremony. |
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. They 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.
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.
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| New Zealand's Richard Pearse as a young man--the only known photo of the shy, modest, and secretive aviation pioneer. |
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.
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| A model of Richard Pearse's 1903 aircraft is displayed atop the New Zealand monument commemorating his achievement located in the aproximate area of the October take offs. |
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
stands 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.
