Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. Before we get started today, we want to
Speaker 1: make sure everyone knows about our upcoming live shows. First up,
Speaker 1: Holly will be at Salt Lake Comic Con September one, three.
Speaker 1: I won't be able to make it to that one,
Speaker 1: so past guest and friend of the show, Brian Young
Speaker 1: will be talking with her about Lawn Cheney. Then on
Speaker 1: October six pm, we will be appearing as part of
Speaker 1: New York Comic Con Presents, and we'll be talking about
Speaker 1: the first comic book. You can find out more information
Speaker 1: on all of this ticket links everything like that if
Speaker 1: you go to missed in History dot com and click
Speaker 1: the link that says live shows. Welcome to steph you
Speaker 1: missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com.
Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tray C. V.
Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Fry So, Holly, you and I
Speaker 1: have been hosts of the show for a little over
Speaker 1: four years now Is that all? Actually? Now that I
Speaker 1: think about it, some patterns have emerged in the comments
Speaker 1: that we get when we share stories on particular topics
Speaker 1: over those uh coming up on five years, like mentioning
Speaker 1: Paul Revere prompts comments about Sybil Lettington, who we talked
Speaker 1: about in Six More Impossible Episodes. UH. Posts about George
Speaker 1: Gordon Lord Byron usually get replies about his daughter Ada Lovelace,
Speaker 1: who has also been the subject of a past episode. UM.
Speaker 1: Anytime we post anything about the Right Brothers, we get
Speaker 1: lots of comments about other people who are not the
Speaker 1: Right Brothers, who we should be talking about. Yeah, various
Speaker 1: levels from hey did you know about two? You're horrible
Speaker 1: and you ignored these important people. Right. So, one reason
Speaker 1: for all these Right Brothers comments is that the Right
Speaker 1: Brothers first has a lot of qualifiers on it. People
Speaker 1: flew in balloons well before the Rights took to the
Speaker 1: air in a plane. There were a lot of gliders
Speaker 1: before them, as well as including ones that they designed
Speaker 1: while they were working toward powered flight. Powered dirigibles also
Speaker 1: predate powered airplanes, and there were also a lot of
Speaker 1: heavier than airplanes that managed to get up off the ground,
Speaker 1: but not necessarily in a way that you could describe
Speaker 1: as flying, its falling with style. Right. So, when people
Speaker 1: say that the Right Brothers were first in quotation marks, Uh,
Speaker 1: there's a series of very particular circumstances we're talking about.
Speaker 1: We're talking about an aircraft heavier than air that achieved
Speaker 1: a sustained and controlled and self powered flight with a
Speaker 1: person on board. All that stuff together and really a
Speaker 1: lot of these distinctions are kind of arbitrary. There's also
Speaker 1: some legitimate conversation to be had about just how controlled
Speaker 1: the White Wright brothers first flights really were. Uh, there
Speaker 1: was some careening involved in some cases. So we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about all of that today and some of the
Speaker 1: other folks who come up pretty often as people who
Speaker 1: maybe shouldn't be considered to have flown before the Right brothers.
Speaker 1: And we're going to say right from the beginning that
Speaker 1: all the men that we're talking about today, we're all
Speaker 1: really remarkable in their own way, regardless of whether we
Speaker 1: get to say first before their achievement. And we also
Speaker 1: want to know that even though the people that we're
Speaker 1: talking about today are all men, we have a whole
Speaker 1: women in Aviation tag on our website that has lots
Speaker 1: of groundbreaking female aviators as well. We're not leaving them out,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna start just as a level set with
Speaker 1: the Wright brothers. So even among people who agree that
Speaker 1: they were first, there is still something to disagree on.
Speaker 1: And that's whether Ohio, where the Wright brothers were from,
Speaker 1: or North Carolina, where they refined their glider designs and
Speaker 1: took their first powered flight, should get most of the credit.
Speaker 1: Whether this interstate disagreement is good natured or not really
Speaker 1: depends on who you ask. And both states have references
Speaker 1: to flight, and the Right brothers flyer on their license
Speaker 1: plates and their state quarters. So the Right Brothers started
Speaker 1: experimenting with flight in the late eight nineties. Wilbert wrote
Speaker 1: to the Smithsonian and to ask for all the prior
Speaker 1: research that they had on it, saying that he was
Speaker 1: quote an enthusiast but not a crank overall, though you know,
Speaker 1: aside from talking to the Smithsonian and whatnot, they were
Speaker 1: comparatively quiet about what they were doing. Other innovators, including
Speaker 1: Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian. We're making very public attempts
Speaker 1: at flight, And it was actually Langley that the Smithsonian
Speaker 1: first supported as being able to claim first flight status.
Speaker 1: The Right brothers, on the other hand, were tinkering, refining,
Speaker 1: and learning from their mistakes, all without a lot of fanfare.
Speaker 1: This would be come doubly true after their first successful flight,
Speaker 1: at which point they became very secretive, especially once they
Speaker 1: were embroiled in a patent or over their flight control system.
Speaker 1: So the Right Brothers shows the outer banks of North
Speaker 1: Carolina as their testing ground because the constant wind helped
Speaker 1: with the lift. They first refined the gliders that they
Speaker 1: were working on until they were satisfied with their aerodynamics,
Speaker 1: and then they turned their attention to power, developing a
Speaker 1: lightweight gasoline engine UH and a propeller. The end result
Speaker 1: was the six five pound eleven point eight one horsepower Flyer,
Speaker 1: which they tried to use for a powered controlled flight
Speaker 1: with the person on board on December fourteenth three. This
Speaker 1: attempt at kill Devil Hills with Wilbur flying did not
Speaker 1: go well. Rather than creating a wheeled undercarriage, they launched
Speaker 1: the flyer from a wooden rail, which it traveled down
Speaker 1: on a wheeled dolly On December fourteenth, Wilbur climbed too
Speaker 1: sharply after leaving that rail, and the flyers stall and crashed.
Speaker 1: They had it repaired in time for another attempt on
Speaker 1: December three, and at about ten thirty five in the morning,
Speaker 1: Orville made a brief and, as we noted at the
Speaker 1: top of the show, somewhat careening hundred and twenty ft
Speaker 1: or 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 in just under a minute. Then
Speaker 1: the flyer pitched and, in Orville's words quote darted into
Speaker 1: the ground. They sent their father a telegram that night
Speaker 1: to tell him the news. Unfortunately, back in their base camp,
Speaker 1: a gust of wind flipped the flyer over and wrecked it,
Speaker 1: and at that point it was too badly damaged to
Speaker 1: be easily repaired, so that put a temporary end to
Speaker 1: their attempts at flight. The Rights kept refining and improving
Speaker 1: their designs from there, testing and making adjustments as they went.
Speaker 1: On October five, n o five, they flew thirty eight
Speaker 1: kilometers near Dayton, Ohio in the right Flyer three. This
Speaker 1: was its own type of first a flight measured in
Speaker 1: 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: Claimant Adair. He was born on February four, eighteen forty one,
Speaker 1: and like a lot of the other early aviators, he
Speaker 1: got his start with ballooning. He made his first heavier
Speaker 1: than aircraft in eighteen seventy three, which was pulled on
Speaker 1: a tether, kind of like a kite. He also studied
Speaker 1: birds and bats, and they would go on to influence
Speaker 1: his aircraft designs. Adair's first powered aircraft was a monoplane
Speaker 1: that he named aol after Ale of Greek mythology, and
Speaker 1: he was granted a patent for it on August eleven.
Speaker 1: On October nine, eight 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. They're claimed. He made another more successful
Speaker 1: attempt in September of the following year, although historians generally
Speaker 1: doubt that one actually happened. In a day, was granted
Speaker 1: a subsidy from the French Minister of War to work
Speaker 1: on another aircraft. The result, after a couple of iterations,
Speaker 1: was the Avian three, another monoplane with twin twenty horsepower
Speaker 1: steam engines with foot pedals to control the rudder, the
Speaker 1: rear wheels, and the speed of the propellers. There was
Speaker 1: also a crank that could change the positioning of the wings.
Speaker 1: Because aircraft never really made it off the ground. On
Speaker 1: October twelfth, it traveled around a circular track in Sassory, France,
Speaker 1: but it never really lifted off. It did briefly come
Speaker 1: off the track during a test on October fourteenth, but
Speaker 1: it didn't remain airborne. This was you could imagine, It's
Speaker 1: like if something hit a hit a bump and sort
Speaker 1: of leapt up in the air. It was that level
Speaker 1: of yea. Because this project was being funded by the
Speaker 1: Ministry of War, the government had a representative witnessing these tests,
Speaker 1: and that general's assessment that witnessed them was that though
Speaker 1: the Aviano three had not successfully flown, those tests should continue.
Speaker 1: The Ministry of War disagreed, and it cut its losses
Speaker 1: at sixty five thousand francs. The Avon three eventually made
Speaker 1: its way to Muse desu Amitier in Paris. But in
Speaker 1: nineteen o six, Alberto Santos Dumont, who you're going to
Speaker 1: talk about next, made Europe's first public airplane flight. So
Speaker 1: clament and Air was really frustrated that he had not
Speaker 1: gotten here first, and he started claiming that he had
Speaker 1: made a successful flight aboard the Avian three, having gone
Speaker 1: at least three or ninety meters during those October fourteen tests.
Speaker 1: He offered no substantiation for this claim, though, and it
Speaker 1: directly contradicted what the General had reported. Flight historians generally
Speaker 1: agree that this is a fabrication trying to get in
Speaker 1: on that um that's sweet, sweet first money. Of all
Speaker 1: the aircraft that we're talking about today, Adairs looked the
Speaker 1: least like a conventional airplane. He fashioned his with wings
Speaker 1: pattern after a bat, and the avy On three's propeller
Speaker 1: blades looked like feathers. It looks like if a tiny
Speaker 1: race of forest creatures in a video game tried to
Speaker 1: make an airplane which to me sounds delightful and I
Speaker 1: wish they all looked that way. It is pretty delightful.
Speaker 1: There will be a picture of it as part of
Speaker 1: the art for this on our website. So it doesn't
Speaker 1: appear that he ever actually made a successful sustained flight,
Speaker 1: but he did succeed in innovated in other areas, including
Speaker 1: in telephone technology. He gave a demonstration of his stereo
Speaker 1: telephone device at the one Paris Exposition of Electricity, and
Speaker 1: he earned a patent for it later that same year.
Speaker 1: Adair died into lose a March fifth, ninet. So next
Speaker 1: we are going to get to another, uh, pretty fascinating character.
Speaker 1: That is Alberto Santos Dumont. We're gonna talk about that
Speaker 1: after a break. Unlike claimant Adair, who, as we said earlier,
Speaker 1: was self taught, Alberto Santos Dumont was formally trained in
Speaker 1: physics and mechanics, as well as in chemistry and an astronomy.
Speaker 1: He was born in Brazil on July seventy three, and
Speaker 1: he was the son of a wealthy coffee planter. When
Speaker 1: he was eighteen, he went to Paris to study. He
Speaker 1: was twenty five when he started experimenting ballooning, making his
Speaker 1: first ascent in Paris on July four in a balloon
Speaker 1: he had named Brazil, and he quickly started trying to
Speaker 1: figure out how to build a practical balloon that could
Speaker 1: be steered. So at that point, as you may recall
Speaker 1: from our numerous episodes on balloon ing, most balloons could
Speaker 1: change altitudes, but they were really at the mercy of
Speaker 1: the wind when it came to the direction of their travel.
Speaker 1: Figuring out how to make a reliably steerable balloon required
Speaker 1: him to rethink basically everything from the shape of the
Speaker 1: balloon itself, to the materials it was made up, to
Speaker 1: the system used to steer, to the engine used to
Speaker 1: drive it. He wound up designing his own three point
Speaker 1: five horsepower gasoline powered internal combustion engine, that being one
Speaker 1: that was safe enough to use an hydrogen filled bag
Speaker 1: of gas, which at the time was quite a feat like.
Speaker 1: Making an internal combustion engine that was was safe enough
Speaker 1: and reliable enough to not set that bag of gas
Speaker 1: on fire was a big deal, and the Santos Dumont
Speaker 1: number one, his first attempt at a steered balloon, ascended
Speaker 1: on September eighteenth. He tinkered with the design and the
Speaker 1: Santos Dumont number three ascended on November eighteen nine. He
Speaker 1: was able to steer it around the Eiffel Tower several
Speaker 1: times before landing. On October nineteenth, nineteen o one, the
Speaker 1: Santos Dumont number six took off from Saint Cloud, circled
Speaker 1: the Eiffel Tower and returned, and under thirty minutes was
Speaker 1: earned the Aero Club of Francis Deutsch prize, which had
Speaker 1: been announced more than a year before in an effort
Speaker 1: to inspire aeronautical innovation. This prize, which I mean this
Speaker 1: was an accomplishment for sure. They basically set this prize
Speaker 1: at a hundred thousand francs, which they did because they
Speaker 1: didn't think it was actually possible that anybody would pull
Speaker 1: it off. So he won that prize and distributed a
Speaker 1: quarter of it to his crew and then gave the
Speaker 1: rest of it to the Parisian poor. And at first
Speaker 1: they actually tried to deny him the prize because it
Speaker 1: took a minute in twenty five seconds to secure the
Speaker 1: aircraft at the finish line, putting the trek just over
Speaker 1: that thirty minute mark. He offered to do the whole
Speaker 1: thing over again, and the judging committee ultimately reversed their decision.
Speaker 1: So this was the first really effective demonstration of a
Speaker 1: practical airship. Previous attempts at airships had been a lot
Speaker 1: more limited than this design. But after this success, Santos
Speaker 1: S Dumont decided that dirigibles were way too influenced by
Speaker 1: weather condition to ever by weather conditions to ever become
Speaker 1: a truly workable method of transportation, So he turned his
Speaker 1: attention to heavier than airplanes. So back in Brazil, he
Speaker 1: designed the fourteen BES or if you're looking at its
Speaker 1: fourteen dash b I S and that's a boxy looking
Speaker 1: biplane with a twenty four horsepower motor. It looked boxy
Speaker 1: because it was designed from box kites, and unlike the
Speaker 1: Right Brothers who used a wooden launching rail to become
Speaker 1: airble worn, he wanted to make an aircraft that could
Speaker 1: take off under its own means. His first attempt to
Speaker 1: do so in July of nineteen o six failed, Another
Speaker 1: attempt on September seven barely left the ground, and then
Speaker 1: a few days later he made a meter off the ground,
Speaker 1: And every time he would sort of address the problems
Speaker 1: that came up. Whatever he discovered that seemed like it
Speaker 1: was preventing him from reaching its successful flight, he would
Speaker 1: refine the design and then he would try again. On
Speaker 1: October twenty three, nineteen o six, the fourteen Bees took off,
Speaker 1: traveled about sixty meters at about three ft in the air,
Speaker 1: and then landed. A flight on November twelfth, nineteen o
Speaker 1: six flew two and twenty. Both of these were obviously
Speaker 1: after the December seventeenth, nine o three Wright 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 beasts versus the wooden launching rail that
Speaker 1: the Right flyer was using. The argument is that the
Speaker 1: Rights flyer doesn't count because the plane relied on separate
Speaker 1: pieces to take off rather than an integrated set of
Speaker 1: wheels that were actually part of the aircraft. They are
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: their 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 under its own power
Speaker 1: rather than using a launching rail, I kind of my
Speaker 1: opinion is that actually has some merit. Yeah. Santos Dumont
Speaker 1: didn't stop with the fourteen Bees. He went on to
Speaker 1: design the Demoisille or Dragonfly, a practical light aircraft, and
Speaker 1: he published the plans for any one 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 nine, thirty two. In addition to
Speaker 1: the aviation awards he earned during his lifetime, he was
Speaker 1: a charismatic showman who became something of a celebrity. Contemporary
Speaker 1: accounts also described him as flamboyant and somewhat feminine, and
Speaker 1: there's been some speculation about what his sexual orientation might
Speaker 1: have been. Today, he is still a highly feered figure
Speaker 1: in Brazil, known as the father of the Brazilian Air Force.
Speaker 1: Multiple roads and schools, as well as the town he
Speaker 1: was born in, have been named after him. Now we
Speaker 1: will move on to Richard Pierce, who, for our first
Speaker 1: year or so on the show, was the person most
Speaker 1: often mentioned when we brought up the Right Brothers. He
Speaker 1: was a New Zealand aviation pioneer born on December three,
Speaker 1: eight seventy seven. He was a mostly self taught inventor
Speaker 1: and farmer, and he was granted his first patent in
Speaker 1: nineteen o two for a new style of bicycle that
Speaker 1: used pedals that you pushed up and down rather than
Speaker 1: in a circle. He invented a lot of other devices
Speaker 1: to including a potato planter and a needle threader. Thinking
Speaker 1: about what it would be like to ride a bike
Speaker 1: where you had to push the pedals up and down.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like a StairMaster bike. That seems sort
Speaker 1: of mean, but probably not uh. He was also working
Speaker 1: on ideas for powered flight. His first airplay design was
Speaker 1: a low profile monoplane made of bamboo wire, canvas and
Speaker 1: steel tubing. On his first attempt to fly it, he
Speaker 1: took off from the road adjacent to his farm on
Speaker 1: the South Island. He flew fifty yards or so and
Speaker 1: then he crashed into a gorse fence. So there were
Speaker 1: some witnesses to this flight. It definitely happened, but the
Speaker 1: details aren't recorded in any kind of official account, so
Speaker 1: there has been a whole lot of debate about exactly
Speaker 1: when this flight happened. Pierce was a bit of a loaner.
Speaker 1: He never married, There weren't really people that he talked
Speaker 1: to day to day about his work, and he also
Speaker 1: didn't keep a lot of written records or notes. Then
Speaker 1: most cases, when it comes to things that he worked on,
Speaker 1: patent applications are the only remaining documentation of what he
Speaker 1: was doing, and this is also why we have way
Speaker 1: less to share about his process than most of the
Speaker 1: other aviators were talking about today. Much later, in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifteen and nineteen eighteen, he wrote two different letters in
Speaker 1: which he remembered the flying having happened in February or
Speaker 1: March of nineteen o four. Researchers reconstructed various bits of
Speaker 1: eyewitness testimony to arrive at a date of March thirty one,
Speaker 1: nineteen o three, although some have also argued that it
Speaker 1: was actually in nineteen o two. And this is why
Speaker 1: for the first year or so after we joined the show,
Speaker 1: he was the person so often cited as a counter
Speaker 1: argument to the Right brothers. However, in fourteen, while doing
Speaker 1: while doing research for a book on Pierce aviation, historian
Speaker 1: Errol Martin found an old article published in the Timoroo
Speaker 1: Post on November seventeenth of nineteen o nine, and in
Speaker 1: this article, Pierce himself contradicts the idea that he was
Speaker 1: flying anywhere close to the time that the Wright brothers did.
Speaker 1: As he said to the reporter quote, I did not
Speaker 1: attempt anything practical with the idea until in nineteen o
Speaker 1: four the St. Louis Exposition authorities offered a prize of
Speaker 1: twenty thousand dollars to the in to the man who
Speaker 1: invented and flew a flying machine over a specified course.
Speaker 1: I 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
Speaker 1: argument right, uh, and Pierce died in christ Church on July.
Speaker 1: Most of the other men we've talked about today wound
Speaker 1: up influencing the greater field of aviation in some way,
Speaker 1: regardless of whether their attempts at controlled powered flight were
Speaker 1: really all that successful. And this was less true for
Speaker 1: Richard Pierce, but it was only because being in New
Speaker 1: Zealand put him really far away from where most of
Speaker 1: that work was happening. His plane, though, was pretty sophisticated
Speaker 1: for the time. It had wing flaps, a rear elevator
Speaker 1: and a wheeled steerable undercarriage and a propeller with variable
Speaker 1: pitch blades. Because he was so physically removed for most
Speaker 1: of the other people physically doing this work, though not
Speaker 1: a lot of people who were trying to come up
Speaker 1: with workable aircraft actually saw it or got to learn
Speaker 1: from it. Yeah, it makes you wonder if he were
Speaker 1: closer to those people, if his innovations wouldn't have accelerated
Speaker 1: the development of flight in a very serious way. And
Speaker 1: for a time after his death, Pierce's work was nearly forgotten. Fortunately,
Speaker 1: knowledge of his efforts did survive. An auctioneer offered his
Speaker 1: last plane to the Canterbury Aero Club, and aviation engineer
Speaker 1: George Bolt later bought it and donated it to the
Speaker 1: Museum of Transport and Technology in Auckland, where a replica
Speaker 1: is now part of their collection. Although it seems unlikely
Speaker 1: that Pierce achieved true sustained flight in his aircraft, modern
Speaker 1: replicas powered with ultralight aircraft engines have been capable of flight.
Speaker 1: So we're going to take one more quick sponsor break
Speaker 1: before we talk about our last first flight, which was
Speaker 1: by Gustav Whitehead. So in a weird little irony, Gustav
Speaker 1: Whitehead is not the name who is most often tossed
Speaker 1: out when we mentioned the right brothers, but he is
Speaker 1: the aviation pioneer who has gotten a lot of the
Speaker 1: most first in flight attention in recent years, particularly in
Speaker 1: the United States. He was born on January first, eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy four, and immigrated to the United States from Bavaria.
Speaker 1: He settled in Connecticut and changed his surname to Whitehead
Speaker 1: from Viskoff. The idea that Whitehead might have flown first
Speaker 1: has come up periodically since the nineteen teens, and the
Speaker 1: most recent big wave of attention came in and that's
Speaker 1: when editor Paul Jackson endorsed the idea that the credit
Speaker 1: should go to Whitehead in the centennial edition of Jane's
Speaker 1: All the World's Aircraft. Australian John Brown launched the website
Speaker 1: Gustav dash whitehead dot com that same year, laying out
Speaker 1: various pieces of evidence that Whitehead was the first to fly,
Speaker 1: including what's purportedly a piece of photographic evidence. So here
Speaker 1: are the claims. On August eighteenth, nineteen o one, the
Speaker 1: Bridgeport Sunday Harold reported that Whitehead had made a half
Speaker 1: mile flight four days before on August fourteen, aboard a
Speaker 1: very bird like monoplane known as Number twenty one, and
Speaker 1: as still happens today, other publications picked up this story
Speaker 1: and mirrored it in their own pages without doing any
Speaker 1: additional reporting of their own on it. This report listed
Speaker 1: to ben as having helped Whitehead in this effort, and
Speaker 1: those were James Dickey and Andrew Steely. In an article
Speaker 1: An American Inventor published April first, nineteen o two, Whitehead
Speaker 1: himself also claimed to have flown for several miles over
Speaker 1: Long Island on January seventeenth of that year. He claimed
Speaker 1: that flight and another shorter one took place on the
Speaker 1: same day. From there, Whitehead made a failed bid to
Speaker 1: enter an aircraft in the aeronautical Company Titian at the
Speaker 1: Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in nineteen o four.
Speaker 1: That was the same one that Richard Pierce referenced in
Speaker 1: his nineteen o nine newspaper interview. Whitehead built several other
Speaker 1: aircraft between nineteen o six and nineteen o nine, none
Speaker 1: of which, ever, apparently flew. When a Scientific American reporter
Speaker 1: visited him in nineteen o three, he was actually working
Speaker 1: on a glider and not on a powered aircraft. There
Speaker 1: were doubts about his claims even at the time. A
Speaker 1: much different article appeared in the Bridgeport Evening Farmer in
Speaker 1: nineteen o two, titled Unrealized Dreams Last Flop of the
Speaker 1: Whitehead Flying Machine. It detailed the various grapes of Whitehead's
Speaker 1: financial backer, Herman Lindy, who had invested six thousand dollars
Speaker 1: in two machines and was disappointed in the fact that
Speaker 1: neither of them could actually fly. The Bridgeport Post published
Speaker 1: a similar critical article on the same day. Whitehead died
Speaker 1: on October tenth, seven and then in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: somebody stumbled over that initial article that had reported that
Speaker 1: he had a successful flight, so people started trying to
Speaker 1: track down confirmation of whether he had flown or not.
Speaker 1: Andrew Seely could not be located when he wasn't listed
Speaker 1: in any local directories. They did, however, find James Dickey,
Speaker 1: who not only said he had not witnessed the flight,
Speaker 1: but also said he was not even there. He did
Speaker 1: not know any Andrew Seeley, and he had never even
Speaker 1: heard of any flight and that or any other Whitehead aircraft.
Speaker 1: When an interviewer tracked him down in nineteen thirty six,
Speaker 1: he said, quote, I believe the entire story of the
Speaker 1: Herald was imaginary and grew out of the comments Whitehead
Speaker 1: discussing what he hoped to get from his plane. It's
Speaker 1: also impossible to go back and review Whitehead's notes and
Speaker 1: schematics to try to replicate his aircraft and see if
Speaker 1: it actually worked, because he didn't leave any A few
Speaker 1: photographs do exist of his nineteen o one machine, although
Speaker 1: all of those show it on the ground and not
Speaker 1: in the air. No photograph is known to exist to
Speaker 1: the machine that purportedly flew several miles in nineteen o two,
Speaker 1: and no photographs exist of one of his aircraft in flight.
Speaker 1: There are photos of an unpowered glider as well as
Speaker 1: one that was flown without a person aboard. This new
Speaker 1: in quotation Mark's photo evidence that was alluded to is
Speaker 1: a really heavily enlarged detail of an exhibition that was
Speaker 1: shown at the Aero Club of America in January nineteen
Speaker 1: o six. This vastly zoomed in on picture shows a
Speaker 1: white blob shaped roughly like one of Whitehead's airplanes when
Speaker 1: viewed from above. People looking to support Whitehead's claims did
Speaker 1: interview a number of witnesses between nineteen thirty four and
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four. However, their statements contradict one another or
Speaker 1: they're demonstrably false, and at least one of them was
Speaker 1: paid to give that story. All of those statements were
Speaker 1: documented at least thirty years after the flight purportedly took place,
Speaker 1: And meanwhile, his family, employers, financial backers, and other people
Speaker 1: who were working in the field of aeronautics at the
Speaker 1: time generally agree that none of his planes ever left
Speaker 1: the ground yeah accurately reconstructing exactly when something happened thirty
Speaker 1: years or more after it happened. When there's not anything
Speaker 1: actually written down about it to jog your memory, that's
Speaker 1: kind of a tall order. So in the Smithsonian published
Speaker 1: a number of lengthy rebuttals of all the various Whitehead evidence,
Speaker 1: and then Scientific American did as well, refuting Whitehead supporters
Speaker 1: use of its own past reporting and support for their claims.
Speaker 1: So people, basically we're pointing to old Scientific American articles
Speaker 1: being like, well, right there, it says that he flew,
Speaker 1: and then Scientific American was like, actually, that's not what
Speaker 1: it says. Supporters often claimed that the only reason that
Speaker 1: the Smithsonian won't seriously consider the possibility of Whitehead beating
Speaker 1: the Right Brothers Too Powered flight is that the contract
Speaker 1: they signed for the flyer specifies that they won't display
Speaker 1: a challenge to the Right Brothers claim to be first. But,
Speaker 1: as quoted in The Economist, aeronautics curator Tom Crouch said quote,
Speaker 1: should persuasive evidence for a prior flight be presented, my
Speaker 1: colleagues and I would have the courage and honesty to
Speaker 1: admit the new evidence and risk the loss of the
Speaker 1: Right flyer. This whole disagreement did basically lead Ohio and
Speaker 1: North Carolina to put aside their differences and basically both
Speaker 1: say not Connecticut. Though. One of the things that gets
Speaker 1: pointed to a lot in this whole thing is like,
Speaker 1: look at how many other articles say this happened. They
Speaker 1: can't all be wrong, but like they're all articles that
Speaker 1: are spawned from one account. Yeah, they're all reporting one article,
Speaker 1: which continues to be an issue in media today when
Speaker 1: one thing will come out and a bunch of other
Speaker 1: people will re report that one thing without doing any
Speaker 1: additional reporting on their own, and then like there's now
Speaker 1: there's a story that's faults and everyone believes it. Uh,
Speaker 1: do you have solicitor mail? Kind of more. Have an update, okay,
Speaker 1: an update on our our episode about the h. L. Hunley,
Speaker 1: which literally just came out because the day after it
Speaker 1: came out, people started letting us know that the Friends
Speaker 1: of the Hunley had issued a press release related to
Speaker 1: the research that we talked about in it um. This
Speaker 1: is an issue where less than twenty four hours after
Speaker 1: our episode came out, new information came out about it,
Speaker 1: which doesn't really happen all that often on a history podcast.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we'll get like a month or two later, but
Speaker 1: that day after thing was just uncanny. Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: was vexatious, not only for that reason, UM, because basically
Speaker 1: what the press release from the Friends of the Hunley
Speaker 1: does is that it uh states that Dr Rachel Lance's
Speaker 1: research is incorrect. UH. They said that they considered and
Speaker 1: rejected a blast wave as the cause of death for
Speaker 1: the creed quite a while ago UM and say that
Speaker 1: Dr Lance did not have access to all of their
Speaker 1: data to frame her own work when she was doing
Speaker 1: that research. But so all of this is kind of
Speaker 1: frustrating because it doesn't actually give any detail about why
Speaker 1: they have um why they had previously said that a
Speaker 1: blast blast wave was not the cause of the death
Speaker 1: for the people aboard the Hunley. So the other really
Speaker 1: frustrating thing about this press release, besides the fact that
Speaker 1: it basically boils down to just saying nah, is that
Speaker 1: it describes Dr Lance as a student, even though she
Speaker 1: earned her PhD last year and she submitted her paper
Speaker 1: to Plus one after she had that PhD. So it
Speaker 1: did grow out of PhD dissertation research that she was
Speaker 1: doing while she was a student, but it was part
Speaker 1: of her PhD dissertation and not like an informal school project.
Speaker 1: So the framing of it in this press release makes
Speaker 1: it sound like she was maybe an undergrad and this
Speaker 1: was some kind of casual activity that she embarked on. UM.
Speaker 1: And it's clear from a lot of the comments on
Speaker 1: the Facebook post where the Friends of the Hunley shared
Speaker 1: this press release initially that a lot of people definitely
Speaker 1: read it that way, like there's a lot of really
Speaker 1: patronizing Oh, it's cute that the student did some kind
Speaker 1: of project on this, but obviously that's not right. Um.
Speaker 1: They also originally called it fake news, which, in addition
Speaker 1: to being incorrect, is a really politically loaded term at
Speaker 1: this point. So I wanted to number one say, okay,
Speaker 1: that development happened that day after our our episode came out.
Speaker 1: But I also it's really important to note that having
Speaker 1: your work scrutinized and assessed by other people is an
Speaker 1: important part of science. People make errors, and peer review
Speaker 1: is not full proof. So of re testing a hip
Speaker 1: hypothesis to confirm whether it's correct, like, that's a critical
Speaker 1: part of the scientific method. But that's also not really
Speaker 1: what was happening with this press release. The press release,
Speaker 1: the most of the detail was just no, it wasn't
Speaker 1: and not actual discussion of her methods or conclusions or
Speaker 1: anything like that. So at this point, on the one hand,
Speaker 1: we have a paper that was submitted to a journal
Speaker 1: that shows all of her work and acknowledges its own limitations,
Speaker 1: and then on the other hand, we have a press
Speaker 1: release saying basically not that's not right, without giving any
Speaker 1: detail about why that's not right. So, uh, I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna say, if folks want to, you know, refute these
Speaker 1: findings or do additional research, great, that is part of
Speaker 1: science and discovering things. But it was highly for us
Speaker 1: strating to um have this this press release basically offer
Speaker 1: no detail and then also frame the whole thing in
Speaker 1: a pretty patronizing and dismissive way. It reads really dismissively,
Speaker 1: and it mischaracterizes her work, which is That's one of
Speaker 1: those things that just gets my hackles up, Like it's
Speaker 1: fine to contradict people, but you can't like mischaracterize them
Speaker 1: in a way that favors you, even though you have
Speaker 1: no evidence, you know, just by trying to like undermine
Speaker 1: their credibility. Well, and they may have evidence, they just
Speaker 1: didn't know what evidence was. Um, there's a link to
Speaker 1: the most recent uh research that's been done um by
Speaker 1: I think it was the Navy using data from the
Speaker 1: Friends of the Henley and their whole project. But that
Speaker 1: report came out before this paper did. So it is
Speaker 1: also not a refutation of what's in the paper, because
Speaker 1: it's not like it came out before the paper doesn't.
Speaker 1: It doesn't say here is why this paper is incorrect
Speaker 1: or whatever. Uh So, anyway, that that was irksome, um
Speaker 1: but you know, when something happens less than twenty four
Speaker 1: hours after your show that came out about it, sometimes
Speaker 1: you got to do a little update after a surprisingly
Speaker 1: short period of time. Also, apparently at some point in
Speaker 1: that episode we said something like nineteen when we really
Speaker 1: went meant eighteen. Sometimes we misspeak. Numbers are tricky for me,
Speaker 1: like I'm that is what I am most likely to
Speaker 1: ever just blurred out the wrong thing. Isn't a year?
Speaker 1: Or yeah? Yeah, well you as you and I were
Speaker 1: recording the episode today that we recorded one time I
Speaker 1: said November when the piece of paper they said October.
Speaker 1: So we have all been there. Yeah, we misspeak sometimes.
Speaker 1: Um If you would like to write to us about
Speaker 1: this or any other podcast where a history podcast that
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works dot com. Are also on Facebook at
Speaker 1: Facebook dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter
Speaker 1: at miss in history. Are Tumbler is missed in History
Speaker 1: dot tumbler dot com, and our Pinterest and our Instagram
Speaker 1: are both also at missed in History. You can come
Speaker 1: to our website, which is missed in history dot com,
Speaker 1: where you will find show notes of all of the
Speaker 1: episodes that Holly and I have ever worked on together.
Speaker 1: Those are now for our newest episodes. They're part of
Speaker 1: the actual episode player page, so all that stuff is
Speaker 1: all there together, uh And on the episode player page
Speaker 1: for this episode, you will also see photos of most
Speaker 1: of the aircraft we have talked about uh there in
Speaker 1: the in the cover art for that particular episode. So
Speaker 1: you can do all that and a whole lot more
Speaker 1: at miss in history dot com for more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics. Is it how staff works
Speaker 1: dot com