One hundred years ago this week, on December 17, 1903, Orville Wright took off from a North Carolina sand dune and made the first powered and controlled flight. That's earned the Wright brothers the title of “First to Fly.”
But the Wrights were tight-lipped, secretive, money-grubbing monopolists. As human beings they make Bill Gates look like Mother Teresa. And they aren’t nearly as colorful as some of the other folks who’ve tried to claim that “First to Fly” title.
One of those people was the Reverend Burrell Cannon. Cannon was a Baptist preacher in that hotbed of aviation research, Pittsburg, Texas.
Reverend Cannon took his inspiration for a flying machine from the Old Testament book of the prophet Ezekiel. So, naturally, he christened the flying machine he built the Ezekiel Airship.
We know about this from newspaper stories of the time, a single photograph, and a couple of machine shop work orders. The airship flew once in 1902. Then the Reverend Cannon loaded it on a railcar to take it to the St Louis Word's Fair.
He was going to fly the Ezekiel Airship there and claim a $100,000 prize that was on offer. But a mighty wind came up near Texarkana and blew the craft off the train, destroying it and Reverend Cannon's hopes.
The fellow with the best documented claim to the first powered flight is probably Augustus Herring. Herring was independently wealthy and he used his money to finance his experiments in flight. Like the Wright brothers, he studied the work of the German Otto Lilienthal and, like the Wright brothers, he had connections to the great engineer, Octave Chanute.
Also like the Wright brothers, he started out with gliders and took his first flight off a sand dune. The differences were that Herring's dune was near St. Joseph, Michigan and the year was 1898.
If you’re counting, that's five full years before the Wright brothers flight. There are no doubts about it either. The flight was covered by newspapers and other observers. There are pictures and detailed plans. So was Herring really the first to fly?
Probably not, at least not in the way that we understand that achievement. His flight was powered, but it was controlled only by the ability of the pilot to shift his weight. It's worth noting that while lots of other folks have claimed that Herring was the first to fly, he never made that claim for himself.
Both Cannon and Herring were colorful characters, but they were nothing compared Alberto Santos-Dumont. For sheer style, no other aviation pioneer is even close.
Santos-Dumont was the wealthy son of a Brazilian coffee planter. He became fascinated with flight, starting with balloons. Then he moved on to powered flight in a heavier-than-air craft that the French press dubbed “Bird of Prey.” The French press got into this because Santos-Dumont moved from Brazil to live in Paris.
And he really lived in Paris. He flew his balloons around the Eiffel Tower. He kept a table at Maxim's where he was adored by women who became frustrated when they discovered that he was only an adequate conversationalist, and then only if you were willing to talk about aviation topics and engines.
His famous flight with the “Bird of Prey” took place in 1906. It was clearly not the first powered and controlled flight. But it was the first powered and controlled public flight. Unlike the secretive Wrights, Santos-Dumont did everything out in public.
Augustus Herring and the Reverend Burrell Cannon were colorful characters indeed, but even in death they’re no match for Santos-Dumont. His heart is preserved in a glass and gold sphere in a museum near Rio.
15 December 2003
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