Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Today is the anniversary of the Wright brothers
Speaker 1: first controlled, powered sustained flight, which took place on the
Speaker 1: outer banks of North Carolina in three So Today's Saturday
Speaker 1: classic is our episode five, First Flight, which talks about
Speaker 1: the Wright brothers first flight, as well as the flights
Speaker 1: of four other aviators. Near the beginning of this episode,
Speaker 1: we note that the people were talking about it in
Speaker 1: it are all men, but that we have a whole
Speaker 1: section of our website devoted to women in aviation. Sadly,
Speaker 1: the format of our website totally changed a few years ago.
Speaker 1: We no longer have that round up page, but we
Speaker 1: do still have all those episodes and they include people
Speaker 1: like Jackie Cochrane, Harriet Quimby, Bessie Coleman, Beryl Markham, Lillian Bland,
Speaker 1: the Night Witches, and the women Air Force Service pilots.
Speaker 1: So enjoy Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class
Speaker 1: production of My Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tray cy Vee Wilson and I'm Holly fry So, Holly,
Speaker 1: you and I have been hosts of the show for
Speaker 1: a little over four years. Now is that all actually?
Speaker 1: Now that I think about it. Some patterns have emerged
Speaker 1: in the comments that we get when we share stories
Speaker 1: on particular topics over those UH coming up on five years,
Speaker 1: like mentioning Paul Revere prompts comments about Sybil Lettington, who
Speaker 1: we talked about in Six More Impossible episodes. UH posts
Speaker 1: about George Gordon lord Byron usually get replies about his
Speaker 1: daughter Ada Lovelace, who has also been the subject of
Speaker 1: a past episode. UM. Anytime we post anything about the
Speaker 1: Right Brothers, we get lots of comments about other people
Speaker 1: who are not at the Right Brothers who we should
Speaker 1: be talking about. Yeah, various levels from hey did you
Speaker 1: know about too? You're horrible and you ignored these important people. Right.
Speaker 1: So one reason for all these Right Brothers comments is
Speaker 1: that the Right Brothers First has a lot of qualifiers
Speaker 1: on it. People flew in balloons well before the Rights
Speaker 1: took to the air in a plane. There were a
Speaker 1: lot of gliders before them, as well as including ones
Speaker 1: that they designed while they were working toward powered flight.
Speaker 1: Powered dirigibles also predate powered airplanes, and there were also
Speaker 1: a lot of heavier than airplanes that managed to get
Speaker 1: up off the ground, but not necessarily in a way
Speaker 1: that you could describe as flying falling with style. Right.
Speaker 1: So when people say that the Right Brothers were first
Speaker 1: in quotation marks, uh, there's a series of very particular
Speaker 1: circumstances we're talking about. We're talking about an aircraft heavier
Speaker 1: than air that achieved a sustained and controlled and self
Speaker 1: powered flight with a person on board. All that stuff together,
Speaker 1: and really a lot of these distinctions are kind of arbitrary.
Speaker 1: There's also some legitimate conversation to be had about just
Speaker 1: how controlled the White Wright brothers first flights really were. Uh,
Speaker 1: there was some careening involved in some cases. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about all of that today and some of
Speaker 1: the other folks who come up pretty often as people
Speaker 1: who maybe should be considered to have flown before the
Speaker 1: Right Brothers. And we're going to say right from the
Speaker 1: beginning that all the men that we're talking about today,
Speaker 1: we're all really remarkable in their own way, regardless of
Speaker 1: whether we get to say first before their achievement. And
Speaker 1: we also want to know that even though the people
Speaker 1: that we're talking about today are all men, we have
Speaker 1: a whole women in Aviation tag on our website that
Speaker 1: has lots of groundbreaking female aviators as well. We're not
Speaker 1: leaving them out, but we're gonna art just as a
Speaker 1: level set with the Right Brothers. So even among people
Speaker 1: who agree that they were first, there is still something
Speaker 1: to disagree on, and that's whether Ohio, where the Right
Speaker 1: Brothers were from, or North Carolina, where they refined their
Speaker 1: glider designs and took their first powered flight, should get
Speaker 1: most of the credit. Whether this interstate disagreement is good
Speaker 1: natured or not really depends on who you ask. And
Speaker 1: both states have references to flight, and the Right Brothers
Speaker 1: flyer on their license plates and their state quarters. So
Speaker 1: the Right Brothers started experimenting with flight in the late
Speaker 1: eighteen nineties. Wilbert wrote to the Smithsonian and to ask
Speaker 1: for all the prior research that they had on it,
Speaker 1: saying that he was quote an enthusiast but not a
Speaker 1: crank overall, though you know, aside from talking to the
Speaker 1: Smithsonian and whatnot, they were comparatively quiet about what they
Speaker 1: were doing. Other innovators, including Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian.
Speaker 1: We're making very public attempts at flight, and it was
Speaker 1: actually Langley that the Smithsonian first supported as being able
Speaker 1: to claim first flight status. The Right Brothers, on the
Speaker 1: other hand, were tinkering, refining, and learning from their mistakes,
Speaker 1: all without a lot of fanfare. This would become doubly
Speaker 1: true after their first successful flight, at which point they
Speaker 1: became very secretive, especially once they were embroiled in a
Speaker 1: patent or over their flight control system. So the Right
Speaker 1: Brothers shows the outer banks of North Carolina as their
Speaker 1: testing ground because the constant wind helped with the lift.
Speaker 1: They first refined the gliders that they were working on
Speaker 1: until they were satisfied with their aerodynamics, and then they
Speaker 1: turned their attention to power, developing a lightweight gasoline engine
Speaker 1: UH and a propeller. The end result was the six
Speaker 1: five pound eleven point eight one horsepower Flyer, which they
Speaker 1: tried to use for a powered controlled flight with a
Speaker 1: person on board on December fourteenth, three. This attempt at
Speaker 1: kill Devil Hills with Wilbur flying did not go well UH.
Speaker 1: Other than creating a wheeled undercarriage. They launched the flyer
Speaker 1: from a wooden rail, which it traveled down on a
Speaker 1: wheeled dolly on December fourteenth. Wilbur climbed too sharply after
Speaker 1: leaving that rail, and the flyers stalled and crashed. They
Speaker 1: had it repaired in time for another attempt on December three,
Speaker 1: and at about ten thirty five in the morning, Orville
Speaker 1: made a brief and as we noted at the top
Speaker 1: of the show, somewhat careening hundred and twenty ft or
Speaker 1: thirty six meter flight stayed aloft for about twelve seconds.
Speaker 1: They had set up a camera ahead of time, and
Speaker 1: John T. Daniels activated the shutter to take the now
Speaker 1: famous picture of the flyer aloft with Wilbur running alongside
Speaker 1: of it. They tried three more times that day, taking turns,
Speaker 1: with their best attempt being there last of the afternoon.
Speaker 1: Wilbur flew eight hundred fifty nine feet that's about two
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty two ms in just under a minute.
Speaker 1: Then the flyer pitched and, in Orville's words quote, darted
Speaker 1: into the ground. They sent their father a telegram that
Speaker 1: night to tell him the news. Unfortunately, back in their
Speaker 1: base camp, a gust of wind flipped the flyer over
Speaker 1: and wrecked it, and at that point it was too
Speaker 1: badly damaged to be easily repaired, so that put a
Speaker 1: temporary into their attempts at flight. The Rights kept refining
Speaker 1: and improving their designs from there, testing and making adjustments
Speaker 1: as they went. On October five, n five, they flew
Speaker 1: thirty eight kilometers near Dayton, Ohio in the right flyer three.
Speaker 1: This was its own type of first a flight measured
Speaker 1: in kilometers instead of meters was a feat at the time.
Speaker 1: Next we are going to talk about perhaps the rights
Speaker 1: most fanciful challengers was self taught French engineer and aviator
Speaker 1: at Claimant Adair. He was born on February four, eight
Speaker 1: forty one, and like a lot of the other early aviators,
Speaker 1: he got his start with ballooning. He made his first
Speaker 1: heavier than aircraft in eighteen seventy three, which was hold
Speaker 1: on a tether kind of like a kite. He also
Speaker 1: studied birds and bats, and they would go on to
Speaker 1: influence his aircraft designs. Adair's first powered aircraft was a
Speaker 1: monoplane that he named Aol after al of Greek mythology,
Speaker 1: and he was granted a patent for it on August eleven.
Speaker 1: On October nine, eighteen ninety, it left the ground and
Speaker 1: moved about a hundred and sixty five feet that's about
Speaker 1: fifty meters. But this wasn't really so much a flight
Speaker 1: as it was a hop he'd successfully made a vessel
Speaker 1: that could go in the air and come back down,
Speaker 1: but it couldn't stay in the air in any sort
Speaker 1: of meaningful way. There claimed he made another more successful
Speaker 1: attempt in September of the following year, although historians generally
Speaker 1: doubt that that one actually happened. In eight two, a
Speaker 1: Day was granted a subsidy from the French Minister of
Speaker 1: War to work on another aircraft. The result, after a
Speaker 1: couple of iterations, was the Avian three, an another monoplane
Speaker 1: with twin twenty horsepower steam engines with foot pedals to
Speaker 1: control the rudder, the rear wheels, and the speed of
Speaker 1: the propellers. There was also a crank that could change
Speaker 1: the positioning of the wings. This aircraft never really made
Speaker 1: it off the ground. On October twel it traveled around
Speaker 1: a circular track in Satsori, France, but it never really
Speaker 1: lifted off. It did briefly come off the track during
Speaker 1: a test on October four, but it didn't remain airborne.
Speaker 1: This was you could imagine as like if something hit
Speaker 1: a hit a bump and sort of leapt up in
Speaker 1: the air. It was that level of yeah, because this
Speaker 1: project was being funded by the Ministry of War. The
Speaker 1: government had a representative witnessing these tests, and that general's
Speaker 1: assessment that witnessed them was that though the Avon three
Speaker 1: had not successfully flown, those tests should continue. The Ministry
Speaker 1: of War disagreed and it cut its losses at sixty
Speaker 1: thousand francs. The avance he eventually made its way to
Speaker 1: Muse desal Emitier in Paris, but in nineteen o six,
Speaker 1: out Berto Santos Dumont, who you're going to talk about next,
Speaker 1: made Europe's first public airplane flight. So claiment and air
Speaker 1: was really frustrated that he had not gotten here first,
Speaker 1: and he started claiming that he had made a successful
Speaker 1: flight aboard the Avian three, having gone at least three
Speaker 1: or ninety meters during those October fourteenth tests. He offered
Speaker 1: no substantiation for this claim, though, and it directly contradicted
Speaker 1: what the general had reported. Flight historians generally agree that
Speaker 1: this is a fabrication, trying to get in on that
Speaker 1: um that's sweet, sweet first money. Of all the aircraft
Speaker 1: that we're talking about today, Adairs looked the least like
Speaker 1: a conventional airplane. He fashioned his with wings pattern after
Speaker 1: a bat and the avy On three's propeller blades looked
Speaker 1: like feathers. It looks like if a tiny race of
Speaker 1: forest creatures in a video game tried to make an airplane,
Speaker 1: which to me sounds delightful and I wish they all
Speaker 1: looked that way. It is pretty delightful. There will be
Speaker 1: a picture of it as part of the art for
Speaker 1: this on our website. So it doesn't appear that he
Speaker 1: ever actually made a successful sustained flight, but he did
Speaker 1: succeed and innovated in other areas, including in telephone technology.
Speaker 1: He gave a demonstration of his stereo telephone device at
Speaker 1: Paris Exposition of Electricity and he earned a patent for it.
Speaker 1: Later that same year. Adair died into Lose a March
Speaker 1: fifth n So next we are going to get to another, uh,
Speaker 1: pretty fascinating character. That is Alberto Santos Dumont. We're going
Speaker 1: to talk about that after a break. Unlike Claiman Adair, who,
Speaker 1: as we said earlier, was self taught, Alberto Santos Dumont
Speaker 1: was formally try in physics and mechanics, as well as
Speaker 1: in chemistry and an astronomy. He was born in Brazil
Speaker 1: on July seventy three, and he was the son of
Speaker 1: a wealthy coffee planter. When he was eighteen, he went
Speaker 1: to Paris to study. He was twenty five when he
Speaker 1: started experimenting with ballooning, making his first ascent in Paris
Speaker 1: on July four in a balloon he had named Brazil,
Speaker 1: and he quickly started trying to figure out how to
Speaker 1: build a practical balloon that could be steered so. At
Speaker 1: that point, as you may recall from our numerous episodes
Speaker 1: on balloon ing, most balloons could change altitudes, but they
Speaker 1: were really at the mercy of the wind when it
Speaker 1: came to the direction of their travel. Figuring out how
Speaker 1: to make a reliably steerable balloon required him to rethink
Speaker 1: basically everything from the shape of the balloon itself, to
Speaker 1: the materials it was made up, to the system used
Speaker 1: to steer, to the engine used to drive it. He
Speaker 1: wound up designing his own three point five horsepower gasoline
Speaker 1: powered internal combustion in that being one that was safe
Speaker 1: enough to use an hydrogen filled bag of gas, which
Speaker 1: at the time was quite a feat like making an
Speaker 1: internal combustion engine that was was safe enough and reliable
Speaker 1: enough to not set that bag of gas on fire.
Speaker 1: Was a big deal, and the Santos Dumont number one,
Speaker 1: his first attempt at a steered balloon, ascended on September eighteenth.
Speaker 1: He tinkered with the design and the Santos Dumont number
Speaker 1: three ascended on November eighteen ninety. He was able to
Speaker 1: steer it around the Eiffel Tower several times before landing.
Speaker 1: On October nineteenth, nineteen o one, the Santos Dumont number
Speaker 1: six took off from Saint Cloud, circled the Eiffel Tower
Speaker 1: and returned, and under thirty minutes was earned the Aero
Speaker 1: Club of France's Deutsch Prize, which had been announced more
Speaker 1: than a year before in an effort to inspire aeronautical innovation.
Speaker 1: This prize, which I mean this was an accomplishment for sure.
Speaker 1: They basically this prize at a hundred thousand francs, which
Speaker 1: they did because they didn't think it was actually possible
Speaker 1: that anybody would pull it off. So he won that
Speaker 1: prize and distributed a quarter of it to his crew
Speaker 1: and then gave the rest of it to the Parisian poor.
Speaker 1: And at first they actually tried to deny him the
Speaker 1: prize because it took a minute in twenty five seconds
Speaker 1: to secure the aircraft at the finish line, putting the
Speaker 1: trek just over that thirty minute mark. He offered to
Speaker 1: do the whole thing over again, and the judging committee
Speaker 1: ultimately reversed their decision. So this was the first really
Speaker 1: effective demonstration of a practical airship. Previous attempts at airships
Speaker 1: had been a lot more limited than this design. But
Speaker 1: after this success, Santos S. Dumont decided that dirigibles were
Speaker 1: way too influenced by weather condition to ever by weather
Speaker 1: conditions to ever become a truly workable method of transportation.
Speaker 1: So he turned his attention to heavier than airplanes. So
Speaker 1: back in Brazil he did the fourteen bees or if
Speaker 1: you're looking at its fourteen dash b I s and
Speaker 1: that's a boxy looking biplane with a twenty four horsepower motor.
Speaker 1: It looked boxy because it was designed from box kites,
Speaker 1: and unlike the Wright brothers who used a wooden launching
Speaker 1: rail to become airborne, he wanted to make an aircraft
Speaker 1: that could take off under its own means. His first
Speaker 1: attempt to do so, in July of nineteen o six failed.
Speaker 1: Another attempt on September seven barely left the ground, and
Speaker 1: then a few days later he made it a meter
Speaker 1: off the ground. And every time he would sort of
Speaker 1: address the problems that came up. Whatever he discovered that
Speaker 1: seemed like it was preventing him from reaching its successful flight,
Speaker 1: he would refine the design and then he would try again.
Speaker 1: On October twenty three, nineteen o six, the fourteen Bees
Speaker 1: took off, traveled about sixty meters at about three ft
Speaker 1: in the air, and then landed. A flight on November twelve,
Speaker 1: nineteen o six, flew two and twenty. Both of these
Speaker 1: were obviously after the December seventeen three Right Brothers flight,
Speaker 1: and he was in fact inspired by that success. The
Speaker 1: reason that people point to Alberto Santos Dumont over the
Speaker 1: Right Brothers is that this whole distinction of the wheeled
Speaker 1: undercarriage on the fourteen Beasts versus the wooden launching rail
Speaker 1: that the Right flyer was using. The argument is that
Speaker 1: the Rights flyer doesn't count because the plane relied on
Speaker 1: separate pieces to take off rather than an integrated set
Speaker 1: of wheels that were actually part of the aircraft. They're
Speaker 1: also some very passionate Santos Dumont supporters who argue that
Speaker 1: the rights didn't fly in three at all, suggesting that
Speaker 1: all their secrecy was really a cover up, and that
Speaker 1: there continued use of a launching rail was evidence that
Speaker 1: they had never really perfected their earlier designs. So I
Speaker 1: don't know if I would go so far as to
Speaker 1: say that's accurate, But in terms of this was a
Speaker 1: self contained aircraft that took off an or its own
Speaker 1: power rather than using a launching rail I got in
Speaker 1: my opinion is that actually has some merit. Yeah. Santos
Speaker 1: Dumont didn't stop with the fourteen Bees. He went on
Speaker 1: to design the Demoisille or Dragonfly, a practical light aircraft,
Speaker 1: and he published the plans for anyone to use to
Speaker 1: build their own. But in nineteen ten he was seriously
Speaker 1: hurt in a plane crash, and that led to him
Speaker 1: having a number of ongoing physical issues and it kept
Speaker 1: him from ever flying again. He had also genuinely, passionately
Speaker 1: loved flight, and he was terribly dismayed at the growing
Speaker 1: use of aircraft in warfare, and he was especially upset
Speaker 1: by because he felt like he was personally responsible. There
Speaker 1: had been so many developments and aviation that were either
Speaker 1: his or that built off of work that he had done,
Speaker 1: and in addition to the lingering effects of the nineteen
Speaker 1: ten crash, he also became seriously ill. He died by
Speaker 1: suicide on July twenty thirty two. In addition to the
Speaker 1: aviation awards he earned during his lifetime, he was a
Speaker 1: charismatic showman who became something of a celebrity. Contemporary accounts
Speaker 1: also describe him as flamboyant and somewhat feminine, and there's
Speaker 1: been some speculation about what his sexual orientation might have been. Today,
Speaker 1: he is still a highly revered figure in Brazil, known
Speaker 1: as the father of the Brazilian Air Force. Multiple roads
Speaker 1: and schools, as well as the town he was born in,
Speaker 1: have been named after him. Now we will move on
Speaker 1: to Richard Pierce, who, for our first year or so
Speaker 1: on the show was the person most often mentioned when
Speaker 1: we brought up the Right Brothers. He was a New
Speaker 1: Zealand aviation pioneer born on December three, eight seventy seven.
Speaker 1: He was a mostly self taught inventor and farmer, and
Speaker 1: he was granted his first patent in nineteen o two
Speaker 1: for a new style of bicycle that used pedals that
Speaker 1: you pushed up and down rather than in a circle.
Speaker 1: He invented a lot of other devices to including a
Speaker 1: potato planter and a needle threader. Thinking about what it
Speaker 1: would be like to ride a bike where you had
Speaker 1: to push the pedals up and down. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like a StairMaster bike. That seems sort of mean, but
Speaker 1: probably not. He was also working on ideas for powered flight.
Speaker 1: His first airplane design was a low profile monoplane made
Speaker 1: of bamboo wire, canvas and steel tubing. On his first
Speaker 1: attempt to fly it, he took off from the road
Speaker 1: adjacent to his farm on the South Island. He flew
Speaker 1: fifty yards or so and then he crashed into a
Speaker 1: gorse fence. So there were some witnesses to this flight.
Speaker 1: It definitely happened, but the details aren't recorded in any
Speaker 1: kind of official account, so there has been a whole
Speaker 1: lot of debate about exactly when this flight happened. Pierce
Speaker 1: was a bit of a loner. He never married, there
Speaker 1: weren't really people that he talked to day to day
Speaker 1: about his work, and he also didn't keep a lot
Speaker 1: of written records or notes. Then most cases, when it
Speaker 1: comes to things that he worked on. Patent applications are
Speaker 1: the only maaning documentation of what he was doing, and
Speaker 1: this is also why we have way less to share
Speaker 1: about his process than most of the other aviators were
Speaker 1: talking about today. Much later, in nineteen fifteen and nineteen eighteen,
Speaker 1: he wrote two different letters in which he remembered the
Speaker 1: flying having happened in February or March of nineteen o four.
Speaker 1: Researchers reconstructed various bits of eyewitness testimony to arrive at
Speaker 1: a date of March thirty one, nineteen o three, although
Speaker 1: some have also argued that it was actually in nineteen
Speaker 1: o two. And this is why for the first year
Speaker 1: or so after we joined the show, he was the
Speaker 1: person so often cited as a counter argument to the
Speaker 1: Right brothers. However, in fourteen, while doing while doing research
Speaker 1: for a book on Pierce aviation, historian Errol Martin found
Speaker 1: an old article published in the Timoroo Post on November
Speaker 1: seventeenth of nineteen o nine, and in this article, Pierce
Speaker 1: himself contractor x the idea that he was flying anywhere
Speaker 1: close to the time that the Wright brothers did. As
Speaker 1: he said to the reporter quote, I did not attempt
Speaker 1: anything practical with the idea until in nineteen o four
Speaker 1: the St. Louis Exposition authorities offered a prize of twenty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars to the men to the man who invented
Speaker 1: and flew a flying machine over a specified course. I
Speaker 1: did not, as you know, succeed in winning the prize.
Speaker 1: Neither did anybody. He went on to describe some tests
Speaker 1: of the machine that he was currently working on, a
Speaker 1: comparatively lightweight craft powered by a twenty five horsepower engine
Speaker 1: that he had designed himself, along with the rest of
Speaker 1: the planes components. Even the tests that he described to
Speaker 1: this reporter were more like hops than true sustained flight,
Speaker 1: and Errol Martin suspected that the reason that the nineteen
Speaker 1: o two or nineteen o three date persisted for as
Speaker 1: long as it did was because people were looking for
Speaker 1: substantiation that that flight occurred somewhere around that time, not
Speaker 1: six or seven years later. Pierce himself also said that
Speaker 1: he didn't fly before the Right brothers, and that he
Speaker 1: became motivated to work on his own aircraft after their successes.
Speaker 1: So the counter argument that we've heard most often in
Speaker 1: response to Richard Pierce saying that he had not beaten
Speaker 1: the right brothers was that he was just being nice.
Speaker 1: He may have been lovely, he may have just been
Speaker 1: being nice. But like, that's not a very substantive counter argument, right, uh.
Speaker 1: And Pierce died in christ Church on July. Most of
Speaker 1: the other men we've talked about today wound up influencing
Speaker 1: the greater field of aviation in some way, regardless of
Speaker 1: whether their attempts at controlled powered flight were really all
Speaker 1: that successful. And this was less true for Richard Pierce,
Speaker 1: but it was only because being in New Zealand put
Speaker 1: him really far away from where most of that work
Speaker 1: was happening. His plane, though, was pretty sophisticated for the time.
Speaker 1: It had wing flaps, a rear elevator and a wheeled
Speaker 1: steerable undercarriage and a propeller with variable pitch blades. Because
Speaker 1: he was so physically removed for most of the other
Speaker 1: people physically doing this work, though not a lot of
Speaker 1: people who were trying to come up with workable aircraft
Speaker 1: actually saw it or got to learn from it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it makes you wonder if he were closer to those people,
Speaker 1: if his innovations wouldn't have accelerated the development of flight
Speaker 1: in a very serious way, and for a time after
Speaker 1: his death, Pierce's work was nearly forgotten. Fortunately, knowledge of
Speaker 1: his efforts did survive. An auctioneer offered his last plane
Speaker 1: to the Canterbury Aero Club, and aviation engineer George Bolt
Speaker 1: later bought it and donated it to the Museum of
Speaker 1: Transport and Technology in Auckland, where a replica is now
Speaker 1: part of their collection. Although it seems unlikely that Pierce
Speaker 1: achieved true sustained flight in his aircraft, modern replicas word
Speaker 1: with ultralight aircraft engines has been capable of flight. So
Speaker 1: we're going to take one more quick sponsor break before
Speaker 1: we talk about our last first flight, which was by
Speaker 1: Gustav Whitehead. So in a weird little irony, Gustav Whitehead
Speaker 1: is not the name who is most often tossed out
Speaker 1: when we mentioned the right brothers, but he is the
Speaker 1: aviation pioneer who has gotten a lot of the most
Speaker 1: first in flight attention in recent years, particularly in the
Speaker 1: United States. He was born on January one, eighteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: and immigrated to the United States from Bavaria. He settled
Speaker 1: in Connecticut and changed his surname to Whitehead. From Viskoff.
Speaker 1: The idea that Whitehead might have flown first has come
Speaker 1: up periodically since the nineteen teens, and the most recent
Speaker 1: big wave of attention came inten and that's when editor
Speaker 1: Paul Jackson endorsed the idea that the credit should go
Speaker 1: to Whitehead in the centennial edition of Jane's All the
Speaker 1: World's Aircraft. Australian John Brown launched the website Gustav dash
Speaker 1: whitehead dot com that same year, laying out various pieces
Speaker 1: of evidence that Whitehead was the first to fly, including
Speaker 1: what's purportedly a piece of photographic evidence. So here are
Speaker 1: the claims. On August eighth, n O one, the Bridgeports
Speaker 1: Sunday Harold reported that Whitehead had made a half mile
Speaker 1: flight four days before on August fourteen, aboard a very
Speaker 1: bird like monoplane known as Number twenty one, and as
Speaker 1: still happens today, other publications picked up this story and
Speaker 1: mirrored it in their own pages without doing any additional
Speaker 1: reporting of their own on it. This report listed to
Speaker 1: ben as having helped Whitehead in this effort, and those
Speaker 1: were James Dickey and Andrew Seeley. In an article in
Speaker 1: American Inventor published April first nineteen o two, Whitehead himself
Speaker 1: also claimed to have flown for several miles over Long
Speaker 1: Island on January seventeenth of that year. He claimed that
Speaker 1: flight and another shorter one took place on the same day.
Speaker 1: From there, Whitehead made a failed bid to enter an
Speaker 1: aircraft in the aeronautical competition at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition
Speaker 1: in St. Louis in nineteen o four. That was the
Speaker 1: same one that Richard Pierce referenced in his nineteen o
Speaker 1: nine newspaper interview. Whitehead built several other aircraft between nineteen
Speaker 1: o six and nineteen o nine, none of which, ever,
Speaker 1: apparently flew. When a Scientific American reporter visited him in
Speaker 1: nineteen o three, he was actually working on a glider
Speaker 1: and not on a powered aircraft. There were doubts about
Speaker 1: his claims even at the time. A much different article
Speaker 1: appeared in the Bridgeport Evening Farmer in nineteen o two,
Speaker 1: titled Unrealized Dreams Last Flop of the Whitehead Flying Machine.
Speaker 1: It detailed the various grapes of Whitehead's financial backer, Herman Lindy,
Speaker 1: who had invested six thousand dollars in two machines and
Speaker 1: was disappointed in the fact that neither of them could
Speaker 1: actually fly. The Bridgeport Post published a similar critical article
Speaker 1: on the same day. Whitehead died on October tenth, and
Speaker 1: then in the nineteen thirties, somebody stumbled over that initial
Speaker 1: article that had reported that he had a successful flight,
Speaker 1: so people started trying to track down confirmation of whether
Speaker 1: he had flown or not. Andrew Seely could not be
Speaker 1: located when he wasn't listed in any local directories. They did, however,
Speaker 1: find James Dickey, who not only said he had not
Speaker 1: witnessed the flight, but also said he was not even there.
Speaker 1: He did not know any Andrew Seeley, and he had
Speaker 1: never even heard of any flight and that or any
Speaker 1: other Whitehead aircraft. When an interviewer tracked him down in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty six, he said, quote, I believe the entire
Speaker 1: story of the Herald was imaginary and grew out of
Speaker 1: the comments white had discussing what he hoped to get
Speaker 1: from his plane. It's also impossible to go back and
Speaker 1: review Whitehead's notes and schematics to try to replicate his
Speaker 1: aircraft and see if it actually worked, because he didn't
Speaker 1: leave any A few photographs do exist of his nineteen
Speaker 1: o one machine, although all of those show it on
Speaker 1: the ground and not in the air. No photograph is
Speaker 1: known to exist in the machine that purportedly flew several
Speaker 1: miles in nineteen o two, and no photographs exist of
Speaker 1: one of his aircraft in flight. There are photos of
Speaker 1: an unpowered glider as well as one that was flown
Speaker 1: without a person aboard. This new in quotation Mark's photo
Speaker 1: evidence that was alluded to is a really heavily enlarged
Speaker 1: detail of an exhibition that was shown at the Aero
Speaker 1: Club of America in January nineteen o six. This vastly
Speaker 1: zoomed in on picture shows a white blob shaped roughly
Speaker 1: like one of Whitehead's airplanes when viewed from above. People
Speaker 1: looking to support Whitehead's claims did interview a number of
Speaker 1: witnesses between nineteen thirty four and nineteen seventy four. However,
Speaker 1: their statements contradict one another or they're demonstrably false, and
Speaker 1: at least one of them was paid to give that story.
Speaker 1: All of those statements were documented at least thirty years
Speaker 1: after the flight purportedly took place, and meanwhile, his family, employers,
Speaker 1: financial backers, and other people who were working in the
Speaker 1: field of aeronautics at the time generally agree that none
Speaker 1: of his planes ever left the ground. Yeah, accurately reconstructing
Speaker 1: exactly when something happened thirty years or more after it happened,
Speaker 1: when there's not anything actually written down about it to
Speaker 1: jog your memory. That's kind of a tall order. So
Speaker 1: in the Smithsonian published a number of lengthy rebuttals of
Speaker 1: all the various Whitehead evidence, and then Scientific American did
Speaker 1: as well, refuting Whitehead supporters use of its own past
Speaker 1: reporting is support for their claims. So people, basically we're
Speaker 1: pointing to old Scientific American articles being like, well, right there,
Speaker 1: it says that he flew, and then Scientific American was like, actually,
Speaker 1: that's not what it says. Supporters often claim that the
Speaker 1: only reason that the Smithsonian won't seriously consider the possibility
Speaker 1: of Whitehead beating the Right Brothers Too Powered flight is
Speaker 1: that the contract they signed for the flyer specifies that
Speaker 1: they won't display a challenge to the Right Brothers claim
Speaker 1: to be first. But, as quoted in The Economist, aeronautics
Speaker 1: curator Tom Crouch said, quote, should persuasive evidence for a
Speaker 1: prior flight be presented, My colleagues and I would have
Speaker 1: the courage and honesty to admit the new evidence and
Speaker 1: risk the loss of the right flyer. This whole disagreement
Speaker 1: did basically lead Ohio and North Carolina to put aside
Speaker 1: their differences and basically both say not Connecticut. Though. One
Speaker 1: of the things that gets pointed to a lot in
Speaker 1: this whole thing is like, look at how many other
Speaker 1: articles say this happened. They can't all be wrong, but
Speaker 1: like they're all articles that are spawned from one account. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're all reporting one article, which continues to be an
Speaker 1: issue in media today when one thing will come out
Speaker 1: and a bunch of other people will re report that
Speaker 1: one thing without doing any additional reporting on their own,
Speaker 1: and then like there's now there's a story that's faults
Speaker 1: and everyone believes it. Fay so much for joining us
Speaker 1: on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
Speaker 1: if you heard an email address or Facebook U r
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