And now lets move on to the 1901 Bridgeport Herald article, the main piece of evidence upon which all Whitehead enthusiasts rest their case. Before I say anything, please go read it, think about it, and form and try to hold onto your own impressions. I'll wait right here while you do.
Overall, my impression of the article is that it's (probably intentionally) hilarious. At times it reads like Jules Verne and at times like a Tom Swift book. Let's go through it:
"Gustave Whitehead of Bridgeport and W. D. Custead of Waco, Texas..."Note: I looked it up- "whacko" was indeed already slang at the time.
"Mr. Whitehead is employed at the Wilmot & Hobbs works as night watchman..."WHAT?! But, but, but he trained as an engine-builder at M.A.N.! Why wasn't he the Chief Engineer?!
"Mr. Whitehead, Andrew Cellie, and James Dickie, his two partners in the flying machine and a representative of the Herald left the little shed."It's only five sentences later! How can the author have already forgotten about Whitehead's partner from Waco, W. D. Custead?!
"The start was made shortly after midnight in order to not attract attention."So... who was watching Wilmot & Hobbs? Did the Bridgeport Herald have an article the next day about a break-in at the plant?
Imagine you've just invented the world's first airplane. Someone asks you "when do you want to fly it?" How stoned would you have to be to respond "the middle of the night- that way I can't see anything. Plus, I can skip out of work!" How stoned would you have to be to invite a reporter to document you playing hooky from work?
"The two engines were carefully tried before starting out…"If you read the article carefully, you realize the design of this aircraft was not twin engine as we think of it (each engine powering a propeller) but rather one engine to drive the ground wheels (automobile mode) and one for flight. Ever see an aircraft like that? To this day? No, it's ridiculously impractical- once you take flight the "ground propelling" engine plus all other elements in the drive train are just dead weight. Weight that could be used for cargo or fuel or a bigger, more powerful, flight engine.
"The machine rolls along the ground on small wooden wheels, only a foot in diameter, and, owing to their being so small, the obstructions in the road made it rock from on side to the other in an alarming fashion at times when the speed was fast. After reaching the Protestant Orphan asylum at the corner of Fairfield avenue and Ellsworth street there is a clear stretch of macadam road the flying automobile was sent spinning along the road at the rate of twenty miles an hour. For short distances from then on the speed was close to thirty miles..."Wait a second, this sounds awfully familiar... yes! This is exactly what was said in the French magazine L'Acetylene. Wow, we've now discovered that the guy who told a guy who told a guy who writes for L'Aceylene this story got it from reading the Bridgeport Herald!
In all seriousness, make some wooden wheels 12" in diameter and attach them to your car. Then, along an unpaved road (macadam is not tarmacadam) drive at 30 MPH. I will be astounded if you even make it to 10 MPH before those wheels disintegrate.
"The location selected to fly the machine was back of Fairfield along the highway where there is a large field and few trees to avoid in flying..."Right, because when you've chosen to fly in the middle of the night, "few trees" becomes a necessity. Realize this contradicts the locations given by most of the sworn witness statements.
"Slowly the machine started at first to run over the ground, but inside of a hundred yards the men who had hold of the ropes and inventor Whitehead were running as fast as their legs would travel. Then Whitehead pulled open the throttle that starts the air propellers or wings and shut off the ground propelling engine."Really try to picture this: The description is that Whitehead is running as fast as he can alongside an airplane on its take-off roll, and just before it lifts off he reaches into the cockpit and works the controls. Let's all take another look at his aircraft:
Anyone else see a rather obvious problem with this? He couldn't even run in front of the plane due to the location of the propellers.
"Whitehead waved his hands enthusiastically and excitedly as he watched his invention rise in the air. He had set the dial so that the power would shut off automatically when it had made one revolution in order that the machine would not keep flying and smash against the trees at the other end of the field."So he can automate turning the engine off but not on? But there's a worse problem here: Take any aircraft in the world, line it up at the end of a runway, and jam the throttle on full. Watch as plane after plane slams into the overrun fence. That's OK, you're smart- use a rope to tie the stick back! That won't work either- as any pilot knows you have to get up to take-off speed before you can rotate for take-off. But let's ignore that and assume the plane gets airborne; something else would have to release back pressure on the controls to enable it to level off. Was the wind perfectly lined up with the field? If not, it would not be long before the plane did a wingover and crashed. The only way this could have worked is if Whitehead's "dial" was a full autopilot. Well, considering this is already the Batmobile, perhaps one of Charles Babbage's Difference Engines (which I'm sure someone claims was actually invented by Whitehead) was on board as well.
"And now the real test was to be made. Whitehead had determined to fly in the machine himself... An early morning milkman stopped in the road to see what was going on. His horse nearly ran away when the big white wings flapped to see if they were all right."Remember how earlier when we were going through the L'Acetylene article I wondered if this was a flapping wings story? Well, here's my answer; yep, it is.
"He stationed his two assistants behind the machine with instructions to hold on to the ropes and not let the machine get away. Then he took up his position in the great bird. He opened the throttle of the ground propeller and shot along the green at a rapid rate.Again, try to visualize what's being described. Why were there assistants to hold the plane down? Were they running at sprint speed when the wings started flapping? If they "couldn't hold her" wouldn't they just be picked up?
"I’m going to start the wings!" he yelled. "Hold her now." The two assistants held on the best they could but the ship shot up in the air almost like a kite. It was an exciting moment.
"We can’t hold her!" shrieked one of the rope men.
"Let go then!" shouted Whitehead back. They let go and as they did so the machine darted up through the air like a bird released from a cage."
Let's discuss the very concept of a "flapping wing" aircraft. It's called an ornithopter and Edward Frost experimented with them starting in 1870 and culminating in his 1904 flight in which an unmanned ornithopter managed to briefly get itself off the ground. Flash forward 38 years and in 1942 a man named Adalbert Schmid finally managed to make an ornithopter which could carry a man almost a kilometer. Since this was during WWII the Luftwaffe took an interest in Schmid's work and evaluated it for a possible silent recon aircraft. It was ultimately dismissed as impractical.
But all this is nether here nor there- look at Whitehead's aircraft. It had a pair of ordinary propellers. The wings may have folded but they most certainly did not flap. That's what just throws this whole "article" into the realm of fantasy.
And here's where I'm going to stop picking at this bit of "journalism" for a very good reason: It's been over fifteen years since I first read the 1901 Bridgeport Herald article. And here, after all these years, I finally see it for what it really is: Mean. Vindictive. Just plain cruel.
Bridgeport wasn't that big a town in those days; everybody must have known, at least somewhat, Gustave Whitehead. The local man who was mad for aviation. Realize that aviation filled the papers in those days- Names like Alberto Santos Dumont, Otto Lilienthal, Octave Chanute, Ferdinand von Zeppelin. All of them royalty or rich or an internationally respected engineer or some combination thereof. Compare this with the guy who has no formal education and works as the night watchman at Wilmot and Hobbs.
He was the local crank.
Passionate as he was about flight, do you think he talked about it in the local pub? Until everyone was sick of hearing about it? How many times was he asked "yeah, but when are you going to get it to work?" And poor Gustave would launch into more excited talk about engines and wings and lift coefficients. And they laughed at him. Ridiculed him. Exactly what was happening to the Wright Brothers in Dayton. You think they were secretive just because they wanted to secure their patents? People laughed at them too. But with Whitehead, in the end someone made the unkindest cut and wrote this "article."
Whitehead was not an idiot- his No. 21 had propellers. He knew he needed a single powerful yet light engine to turn them. He knew he needed wings to generate lift. To suggest that he would create some Rube Goldberg flapping contraption flown by the light of the moon is an insult. A means for an entire town to have a good laugh at the local crackpot.
It was a different time, with different sensibilities. The world was a cruel place, and people had thicker skins. And still, I can't help but feel for the poor man when he first read that story. All the times for years afterwards someone on the street brought it up and laughed. And I've come to realize that's the likeliest motivation for the affidavits that suddenly appeared in the mid 1930s. They all felt guilty. And so they tried to give Gustave in death what they could not afford him in life: Dignity.
But as much pity as we feel for this man, it nonetheless is not right to rob the legacy of the true inventors of heavier-than-air flight, Wilbur and Orville Wright.
The bottom line is that in my original post on this topic I discussed the fact that Glenn Curtiss was desperate to break the Wright's patents and that his main tactic was "prior art." Curtiss knew of the Whitehead story and he sent his paid investigators to try to find ANYONE willing to give a sworn witness deposition. The fact that Curtiss dismissed Whitehead as a fraud demonstrates that his investigators were unable to find anyone. That was true all the way to and through WWI, which finally resulted in the "aviation patent pool." Absolutely no individual (other than an unknown author at the Bridgeport Herald) claimed to have witnessed a Whitehead flight all the way up until 1934, more than thirty years later! Indeed, Curtiss's team tried hard to identify the author of the 1901 article and get them to sign a deposition... but were unable to do so.
So, how would you judge a sworn statement refused at the time of an alleged incident but given thirty or even sixty years later? Would you believe any such thing? Who could find this credible? Apparently one John Brown, the editor of Jane's, and an entire State Legislature.
(Fact-Check: of the witnesses to the 1st 1903 powered flight of the Wrights, only two made written statements. Daniels said the plane took off from the slope of a sand dune and flew toward the beach below head height. The other witness wrote, he saw what Daniels saw, i.e. he made no statement of his own. Neither witness testified under oath.
Why would they testify under oath? There was never a trial. And this also brings up the central difference between the Wrights and Whitehead. When the Wrights claimed to have invented the airplane they could offer the most effective proof of all- invite you watch them as they flew their latest plane. Or, within a short time, go for a ride with them in their latest plane. Their proof was sufficient for the US Patent Office. Go to the Wings Over Rockies air museum and you can meet a docent whose father received flight training from Orville Wright. His pilot's license hangs on the wall- signed by Orville himself.
Contrast that with Whitehead: A claimed single flight that was never reproduced. No career building aircraft. No history (other than the one flight) of him ever flying in a powered airplane. He couldn't even afford to buy one from the Wrights. He died a lowly factory worker (apparently after losing the night watchman job) a forgotten footnote for decades.
That’s what that famous photo shows. A hillside launch into a 27mph headwind gliding down to MSL in ground effect – I’m not making this up.).
Oh, yes you are. Let's all look at the photo of the first flight of the Wright Flyer:
Looks pretty darn flat to me- my driveway has more of a slope! Underneath the Flyer you can see its launch track- that plane rose to that height using lift generated by its wings on level ground. That's why they needed to use a catapult assist!
MSL is "mean sea level" and unlike Whitehead the Flyer did not make a water landing at the end of the flight; they were almost half a mile from the ocean.
The only part you didn't make up is the part the Wright Brothers themselves described: The 27 MPH headwind. Indeed, the brothers traveled there for specifically that reason. It's also why aircraft carriers, when launching aircraft, turn into the wind and steam at maximum speed. It reduced the necessary ground speed for flight. When an F-18 does a catapult launch off a carrier, is that a flight of a motorized heavier-than-air craft or not?
So, there you have it! Once again, facts are getting in the way of another religious-type legend!
As I hope I've shown to everyone, if I were a proponent of Whitehead being the first to fly "the facts" are the last thing I'd want to bring up… for the simple reason that the facts prove the exact opposite!
When it comes to the Connecticut Legislature I now suspect they did the same thing the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives admitted to doing with Obamacare: They passed it without actually reading it.
As for the pejorative phrase "religious-type legend," it's not dogma when you believe something for which you have objective evidence such as patents and photographs. It does take a leap of faith to have "sworn witness statements!" which directly contradict one another and yet somehow believe that they are all still somehow true. It takes religious devotion to look at a photo of an airplane which clearly has propellers and then produce as proof of that airplane's flight an article in which it flies by means of flapping wings.
Indeed, facts get in the way of the religious-type legend that Whitehead flew before the Wright Brothers.
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