September 11, 2017 • 37 mins
When people say the Wright Brothers were first to fly, they're talking about a very particular set of circumstances. There are other contenders to the title of "first in flight," and each has their own compelling story and list of achievements.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. Before we get started today, we want to
make sure everyone knows about our upcoming live shows. First up,
Holly will be at Salt Lake Comic Con September one, three.
I won't be able to make it to that one,
so past guest and friend of the show, Brian Young
will be talking with her about Lawn Cheney. Then on
(00:23):
October six pm, we will be appearing as part of
New York Comic Con Presents, and we'll be talking about
the first comic book. You can find out more information
on all of this ticket links everything like that if
you go to missed in History dot com and click
the link that says live shows. Welcome to steph you
(00:45):
missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com.
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tray C. V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Fry So, Holly, you and I
have been hosts of the show for a little over
four years now Is that all? Actually? Now that I
(01:10):
think about it, some patterns have emerged in the comments
that we get when we share stories on particular topics
over those uh coming up on five years, like mentioning
Paul Revere prompts comments about Sybil Lettington, who we talked
about in Six More Impossible Episodes. UH. Posts about George
(01:32):
Gordon Lord Byron usually get replies about his daughter Ada Lovelace,
who has also been the subject of a past episode. UM.
Anytime we post anything about the Right Brothers, we get
lots of comments about other people who are not the
Right Brothers, who we should be talking about. Yeah, various
levels from hey did you know about two? You're horrible
(01:55):
and you ignored these important people. Right. So, one reason
for all these Right Brothers comments is that the Right
Brothers first has a lot of qualifiers on it. People
flew in balloons well before the Rights took to the
air in a plane. There were a lot of gliders
(02:16):
before them, as well as including ones that they designed
while they were working toward powered flight. Powered dirigibles also
predate powered airplanes, and there were also a lot of
heavier than airplanes that managed to get up off the ground,
but not necessarily in a way that you could describe
as flying, its falling with style. Right. So, when people
(02:40):
say that the Right Brothers were first in quotation marks, Uh,
there's a series of very particular circumstances we're talking about.
We're talking about an aircraft heavier than air that achieved
a sustained and controlled and self powered flight with a
person on board. All that stuff together and really a
lot of these distinctions are kind of arbitrary. There's also
(03:00):
some legitimate conversation to be had about just how controlled
the White Wright brothers first flights really were. Uh, there
was some careening involved in some cases. So we're gonna
talk about all of that today and some of the
other folks who come up pretty often as people who
maybe shouldn't be considered to have flown before the Right brothers.
(03:21):
And we're going to say right from the beginning that
all the men that we're talking about today, we're all
really remarkable in their own way, regardless of whether we
get to say first before their achievement. And we also
want to know that even though the people that we're
talking about today are all men, we have a whole
women in Aviation tag on our website that has lots
of groundbreaking female aviators as well. We're not leaving them out,
(03:45):
but we're gonna start just as a level set with
the Wright brothers. So even among people who agree that
they were first, there is still something to disagree on.
And that's whether Ohio, where the Wright brothers were from,
or North Carolina, where they refined their glider designs and
took their first powered flight, should get most of the credit.
Whether this interstate disagreement is good natured or not really
(04:08):
depends on who you ask. And both states have references
to flight, and the Right brothers flyer on their license
plates and their state quarters. So the Right Brothers started
experimenting with flight in the late eight nineties. Wilbert wrote
to the Smithsonian and to ask for all the prior
research that they had on it, saying that he was
quote an enthusiast but not a crank overall, though you know,
(04:33):
aside from talking to the Smithsonian and whatnot, they were
comparatively quiet about what they were doing. Other innovators, including
Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian. We're making very public attempts
at flight, And it was actually Langley that the Smithsonian
first supported as being able to claim first flight status.
The Right brothers, on the other hand, were tinkering, refining,
(04:55):
and learning from their mistakes, all without a lot of fanfare.
This would be come doubly true after their first successful flight,
at which point they became very secretive, especially once they
were embroiled in a patent or over their flight control system.
So the Right Brothers shows the outer banks of North
Carolina as their testing ground because the constant wind helped
(05:16):
with the lift. They first refined the gliders that they
were working on until they were satisfied with their aerodynamics,
and then they turned their attention to power, developing a
lightweight gasoline engine UH and a propeller. The end result
was the six five pound eleven point eight one horsepower Flyer,
which they tried to use for a powered controlled flight
(05:37):
with the person on board on December fourteenth three. This
attempt at kill Devil Hills with Wilbur flying did not
go well. Rather than creating a wheeled undercarriage, they launched
the flyer from a wooden rail, which it traveled down
on a wheeled dolly On December fourteenth, Wilbur climbed too
sharply after leaving that rail, and the flyers stall and crashed.
(06:01):
They had it repaired in time for another attempt on
December three, and at about ten thirty five in the morning,
Orville made a brief and, as we noted at the
top of the show, somewhat careening hundred and twenty ft
or thirty six meter flight stayed aloft for about twelve seconds.
They had set up a camera ahead of time, and
(06:21):
John T. Daniels activated the shutter to take the now
famous picture of the flyer aloft with Wilbur running alongside
of it. They tried three more times that day taking turns,
with their best attempt being there last of the afternoon.
Wilbur flew eight hundred fifty nine feet that's about two
hundred and sixty two in just under a minute. Then
(06:43):
the flyer pitched and, in Orville's words quote darted into
the ground. They sent their father a telegram that night
to tell him the news. Unfortunately, back in their base camp,
a gust of wind flipped the flyer over and wrecked it,
and at that point it was too badly damaged to
be easily repaired, so that put a temporary end to
their attempts at flight. The Rights kept refining and improving
(07:06):
their designs from there, testing and making adjustments as they went.
On October five, n o five, they flew thirty eight
kilometers near Dayton, Ohio in the right Flyer three. This
was its own type of first a flight measured in
kilometers instead of meters was a feat at the time.
Next we are going to talk about perhaps the rights
(07:27):
most fanciful challengers was self taught French engineer and aviator
Claimant Adair. He was born on February four, eighteen forty one,
and like a lot of the other early aviators, he
got his start with ballooning. He made his first heavier
than aircraft in eighteen seventy three, which was pulled on
a tether, kind of like a kite. He also studied
(07:50):
birds and bats, and they would go on to influence
his aircraft designs. Adair's first powered aircraft was a monoplane
that he named aol after Ale of Greek mythology, and
he was granted a patent for it on August eleven.
On October nine, eight ninety it left the ground and
moved about a hundred and sixty five feet that's about
(08:12):
fifty meters, But this wasn't really so much a flight
as it was a hop. He'd successfully made a vessel
that could go in the air and come back down,
but it couldn't stay in the air in any sort
of meaningful way. They're claimed. He made another more successful
attempt in September of the following year, although historians generally
(08:33):
doubt that one actually happened. In a day, was granted
a subsidy from the French Minister of War to work
on another aircraft. The result, after a couple of iterations,
was the Avian three, another monoplane with twin twenty horsepower
steam engines with foot pedals to control the rudder, the
rear wheels, and the speed of the propellers. There was
(08:55):
also a crank that could change the positioning of the wings.
Because aircraft never really made it off the ground. On
October twelfth, it traveled around a circular track in Sassory, France,
but it never really lifted off. It did briefly come
off the track during a test on October fourteenth, but
it didn't remain airborne. This was you could imagine, It's
(09:17):
like if something hit a hit a bump and sort
of leapt up in the air. It was that level
of yea. Because this project was being funded by the
Ministry of War, the government had a representative witnessing these tests,
and that general's assessment that witnessed them was that though
the Aviano three had not successfully flown, those tests should continue.
(09:39):
The Ministry of War disagreed, and it cut its losses
at sixty five thousand francs. The Avon three eventually made
its way to Muse desu Amitier in Paris. But in
nineteen o six, Alberto Santos Dumont, who you're going to
talk about next, made Europe's first public airplane flight. So
(10:00):
clament and Air was really frustrated that he had not
gotten here first, and he started claiming that he had
made a successful flight aboard the Avian three, having gone
at least three or ninety meters during those October fourteen tests.
He offered no substantiation for this claim, though, and it
directly contradicted what the General had reported. Flight historians generally
(10:22):
agree that this is a fabrication trying to get in
on that um that's sweet, sweet first money. Of all
the aircraft that we're talking about today, Adairs looked the
least like a conventional airplane. He fashioned his with wings
pattern after a bat, and the avy On three's propeller
blades looked like feathers. It looks like if a tiny
(10:45):
race of forest creatures in a video game tried to
make an airplane which to me sounds delightful and I
wish they all looked that way. It is pretty delightful.
There will be a picture of it as part of
the art for this on our website. So it doesn't
appear that he ever actually made a successful sustained flight,
but he did succeed in innovated in other areas, including
(11:06):
in telephone technology. He gave a demonstration of his stereo
telephone device at the one Paris Exposition of Electricity, and
he earned a patent for it later that same year.
Adair died into lose a March fifth, ninet. So next
we are going to get to another, uh, pretty fascinating character.
(11:28):
That is Alberto Santos Dumont. We're gonna talk about that
after a break. Unlike claimant Adair, who, as we said earlier,
was self taught, Alberto Santos Dumont was formally trained in
physics and mechanics, as well as in chemistry and an astronomy.
He was born in Brazil on July seventy three, and
(11:51):
he was the son of a wealthy coffee planter. When
he was eighteen, he went to Paris to study. He
was twenty five when he started experimenting ballooning, making his
first ascent in Paris on July four in a balloon
he had named Brazil, and he quickly started trying to
figure out how to build a practical balloon that could
be steered. So at that point, as you may recall
(12:14):
from our numerous episodes on balloon ing, most balloons could
change altitudes, but they were really at the mercy of
the wind when it came to the direction of their travel.
Figuring out how to make a reliably steerable balloon required
him to rethink basically everything from the shape of the
balloon itself, to the materials it was made up, to
the system used to steer, to the engine used to
(12:36):
drive it. He wound up designing his own three point
five horsepower gasoline powered internal combustion engine, that being one
that was safe enough to use an hydrogen filled bag
of gas, which at the time was quite a feat like.
Making an internal combustion engine that was was safe enough
(12:56):
and reliable enough to not set that bag of gas
on fire was a big deal, and the Santos Dumont
number one, his first attempt at a steered balloon, ascended
on September eighteenth. He tinkered with the design and the
Santos Dumont number three ascended on November eighteen nine. He
was able to steer it around the Eiffel Tower several
(13:18):
times before landing. On October nineteenth, nineteen o one, the
Santos Dumont number six took off from Saint Cloud, circled
the Eiffel Tower and returned, and under thirty minutes was
earned the Aero Club of Francis Deutsch prize, which had
been announced more than a year before in an effort
to inspire aeronautical innovation. This prize, which I mean this
(13:40):
was an accomplishment for sure. They basically set this prize
at a hundred thousand francs, which they did because they
didn't think it was actually possible that anybody would pull
it off. So he won that prize and distributed a
quarter of it to his crew and then gave the
rest of it to the Parisian poor. And at first
they actually tried to deny him the prize because it
(14:01):
took a minute in twenty five seconds to secure the
aircraft at the finish line, putting the trek just over
that thirty minute mark. He offered to do the whole
thing over again, and the judging committee ultimately reversed their decision.
So this was the first really effective demonstration of a
practical airship. Previous attempts at airships had been a lot
(14:24):
more limited than this design. But after this success, Santos
S Dumont decided that dirigibles were way too influenced by
weather condition to ever by weather conditions to ever become
a truly workable method of transportation, So he turned his
attention to heavier than airplanes. So back in Brazil, he
designed the fourteen BES or if you're looking at its
(14:46):
fourteen dash b I S and that's a boxy looking
biplane with a twenty four horsepower motor. It looked boxy
because it was designed from box kites, and unlike the
Right Brothers who used a wooden launching rail to become
airble worn, he wanted to make an aircraft that could
take off under its own means. His first attempt to
do so in July of nineteen o six failed, Another
(15:09):
attempt on September seven barely left the ground, and then
a few days later he made a meter off the ground,
And every time he would sort of address the problems
that came up. Whatever he discovered that seemed like it
was preventing him from reaching its successful flight, he would
refine the design and then he would try again. On
October twenty three, nineteen o six, the fourteen Bees took off,
(15:31):
traveled about sixty meters at about three ft in the air,
and then landed. A flight on November twelfth, nineteen o
six flew two and twenty. Both of these were obviously
after the December seventeenth, nine o three Wright Brothers flight,
and he was in fact inspired by that success. The
(15:51):
reason that people point to Alberto Santos Dumont over the
Right Brothers is that this whole distinction of the wheeled
undercarriage on the beasts versus the wooden launching rail that
the Right flyer was using. The argument is that the
Rights flyer doesn't count because the plane relied on separate
pieces to take off rather than an integrated set of
(16:12):
wheels that were actually part of the aircraft. They are
also some very passionate Santos Dumont supporters who argue that
the Rights didn't fly in three at all, suggesting that
all their secrecy was really a cover up, and that
their continued use of a launching rail was evidence that
they had never really perfected their earlier designs. So I
(16:34):
don't know if I would go so far as to
say that's accurate. But in terms of this was a
self contained aircraft that took off under its own power
rather than using a launching rail, I kind of my
opinion is that actually has some merit. Yeah. Santos Dumont
didn't stop with the fourteen Bees. He went on to
design the Demoisille or Dragonfly, a practical light aircraft, and
(16:58):
he published the plans for any one to use to
build their own. But in nineteen ten he was seriously
hurt in a plane crash, and that led to him
having a number of ongoing physical issues and it kept
him from ever flying again. He had also genuinely, passionately
loved flight, and he was terribly dismayed at the growing
use of aircraft in warfare, and he was especially upset
(17:21):
by because he felt like he was personally responsible. There
had been so many developments and aviation that were either
his or that built off of work that he had done.
And in addition to the lingering effects of the nineteen
ten crash, he also became seriously ill. He died by
suicide on July twenty nine, thirty two. In addition to
(17:41):
the aviation awards he earned during his lifetime, he was
a charismatic showman who became something of a celebrity. Contemporary
accounts also described him as flamboyant and somewhat feminine, and
there's been some speculation about what his sexual orientation might
have been. Today, he is still a highly feered figure
in Brazil, known as the father of the Brazilian Air Force.
(18:04):
Multiple roads and schools, as well as the town he
was born in, have been named after him. Now we
will move on to Richard Pierce, who, for our first
year or so on the show, was the person most
often mentioned when we brought up the Right Brothers. He
was a New Zealand aviation pioneer born on December three,
(18:25):
eight seventy seven. He was a mostly self taught inventor
and farmer, and he was granted his first patent in
nineteen o two for a new style of bicycle that
used pedals that you pushed up and down rather than
in a circle. He invented a lot of other devices
to including a potato planter and a needle threader. Thinking
(18:46):
about what it would be like to ride a bike
where you had to push the pedals up and down.
It's kind of like a StairMaster bike. That seems sort
of mean, but probably not uh. He was also working
on ideas for powered flight. His first airplay design was
a low profile monoplane made of bamboo wire, canvas and
steel tubing. On his first attempt to fly it, he
(19:08):
took off from the road adjacent to his farm on
the South Island. He flew fifty yards or so and
then he crashed into a gorse fence. So there were
some witnesses to this flight. It definitely happened, but the
details aren't recorded in any kind of official account, so
there has been a whole lot of debate about exactly
when this flight happened. Pierce was a bit of a loaner.
(19:30):
He never married, There weren't really people that he talked
to day to day about his work, and he also
didn't keep a lot of written records or notes. Then
most cases, when it comes to things that he worked on,
patent applications are the only remaining documentation of what he
was doing, and this is also why we have way
less to share about his process than most of the
(19:50):
other aviators were talking about today. Much later, in nineteen
fifteen and nineteen eighteen, he wrote two different letters in
which he remembered the flying having happened in February or
March of nineteen o four. Researchers reconstructed various bits of
eyewitness testimony to arrive at a date of March thirty one,
(20:11):
nineteen o three, although some have also argued that it
was actually in nineteen o two. And this is why
for the first year or so after we joined the show,
he was the person so often cited as a counter
argument to the Right brothers. However, in fourteen, while doing
while doing research for a book on Pierce aviation, historian
(20:34):
Errol Martin found an old article published in the Timoroo
Post on November seventeenth of nineteen o nine, and in
this article, Pierce himself contradicts the idea that he was
flying anywhere close to the time that the Wright brothers did.
As he said to the reporter quote, I did not
attempt anything practical with the idea until in nineteen o
(20:54):
four the St. Louis Exposition authorities offered a prize of
twenty thousand dollars to the in to the man who
invented and flew a flying machine over a specified course.
I did not, as you know, succeed in winning the prize.
Neither did anybody. He went on to describe some tests
of the machine that he was currently working on, a
(21:15):
comparatively lightweight craft powered by a twenty five horsepower engine
that he had designed himself, along with the rest of
the planes components. Even the tests that he described to
this reporter were more like hops than true sustained flight,
and Errol Martin suspected that the reason that the nineteen
o two or nineteen o three date persisted for as
(21:35):
long as it did was because people were looking for
substantiation that that flight occurred somewhere around that time, not
six or seven years later. Pierce himself also said that
he didn't fly before the Right Brothers, and that he
became motivated to work on his own aircraft after their successes.
So the counter argument that we've heard most often in
(21:58):
response to Richard Pierce saying that he had not beaten
the Right Brothers was that he was just being nice.
He may have been lovely, he may have just been
being nice, but like that's not a very substantive counter
argument right, uh, and Pierce died in christ Church on July.
(22:24):
Most of the other men we've talked about today wound
up influencing the greater field of aviation in some way,
regardless of whether their attempts at controlled powered flight were
really all that successful. And this was less true for
Richard Pierce, but it was only because being in New
Zealand put him really far away from where most of
that work was happening. His plane, though, was pretty sophisticated
(22:47):
for the time. It had wing flaps, a rear elevator
and a wheeled steerable undercarriage and a propeller with variable
pitch blades. Because he was so physically removed for most
of the other people physically doing this work, though not
a lot of people who were trying to come up
with workable aircraft actually saw it or got to learn
from it. Yeah, it makes you wonder if he were
(23:09):
closer to those people, if his innovations wouldn't have accelerated
the development of flight in a very serious way. And
for a time after his death, Pierce's work was nearly forgotten. Fortunately,
knowledge of his efforts did survive. An auctioneer offered his
last plane to the Canterbury Aero Club, and aviation engineer
George Bolt later bought it and donated it to the
(23:31):
Museum of Transport and Technology in Auckland, where a replica
is now part of their collection. Although it seems unlikely
that Pierce achieved true sustained flight in his aircraft, modern
replicas powered with ultralight aircraft engines have been capable of flight.
So we're going to take one more quick sponsor break
before we talk about our last first flight, which was
(23:55):
by Gustav Whitehead. So in a weird little irony, Gustav
Whitehead is not the name who is most often tossed
out when we mentioned the right brothers, but he is
the aviation pioneer who has gotten a lot of the
most first in flight attention in recent years, particularly in
(24:17):
the United States. He was born on January first, eighteen
seventy four, and immigrated to the United States from Bavaria.
He settled in Connecticut and changed his surname to Whitehead
from Viskoff. The idea that Whitehead might have flown first
has come up periodically since the nineteen teens, and the
most recent big wave of attention came in and that's
(24:41):
when editor Paul Jackson endorsed the idea that the credit
should go to Whitehead in the centennial edition of Jane's
All the World's Aircraft. Australian John Brown launched the website
Gustav dash whitehead dot com that same year, laying out
various pieces of evidence that Whitehead was the first to fly,
including what's purportedly a piece of photographic evidence. So here
(25:04):
are the claims. On August eighteenth, nineteen o one, the
Bridgeport Sunday Harold reported that Whitehead had made a half
mile flight four days before on August fourteen, aboard a
very bird like monoplane known as Number twenty one, and
as still happens today, other publications picked up this story
and mirrored it in their own pages without doing any
(25:28):
additional reporting of their own on it. This report listed
to ben as having helped Whitehead in this effort, and
those were James Dickey and Andrew Steely. In an article
An American Inventor published April first, nineteen o two, Whitehead
himself also claimed to have flown for several miles over
Long Island on January seventeenth of that year. He claimed
(25:51):
that flight and another shorter one took place on the
same day. From there, Whitehead made a failed bid to
enter an aircraft in the aeronautical Company Titian at the
Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in nineteen o four.
That was the same one that Richard Pierce referenced in
his nineteen o nine newspaper interview. Whitehead built several other
aircraft between nineteen o six and nineteen o nine, none
(26:14):
of which, ever, apparently flew. When a Scientific American reporter
visited him in nineteen o three, he was actually working
on a glider and not on a powered aircraft. There
were doubts about his claims even at the time. A
much different article appeared in the Bridgeport Evening Farmer in
nineteen o two, titled Unrealized Dreams Last Flop of the
(26:37):
Whitehead Flying Machine. It detailed the various grapes of Whitehead's
financial backer, Herman Lindy, who had invested six thousand dollars
in two machines and was disappointed in the fact that
neither of them could actually fly. The Bridgeport Post published
a similar critical article on the same day. Whitehead died
(26:58):
on October tenth, seven and then in the nineteen thirties,
somebody stumbled over that initial article that had reported that
he had a successful flight, so people started trying to
track down confirmation of whether he had flown or not.
Andrew Seely could not be located when he wasn't listed
in any local directories. They did, however, find James Dickey,
(27:19):
who not only said he had not witnessed the flight,
but also said he was not even there. He did
not know any Andrew Seeley, and he had never even
heard of any flight and that or any other Whitehead aircraft.
When an interviewer tracked him down in nineteen thirty six,
he said, quote, I believe the entire story of the
Herald was imaginary and grew out of the comments Whitehead
(27:41):
discussing what he hoped to get from his plane. It's
also impossible to go back and review Whitehead's notes and
schematics to try to replicate his aircraft and see if
it actually worked, because he didn't leave any A few
photographs do exist of his nineteen o one machine, although
all of those show it on the ground and not
in the air. No photograph is known to exist to
(28:03):
the machine that purportedly flew several miles in nineteen o two,
and no photographs exist of one of his aircraft in flight.
There are photos of an unpowered glider as well as
one that was flown without a person aboard. This new
in quotation Mark's photo evidence that was alluded to is
a really heavily enlarged detail of an exhibition that was
(28:28):
shown at the Aero Club of America in January nineteen
o six. This vastly zoomed in on picture shows a
white blob shaped roughly like one of Whitehead's airplanes when
viewed from above. People looking to support Whitehead's claims did
interview a number of witnesses between nineteen thirty four and
nineteen seventy four. However, their statements contradict one another or
(28:51):
they're demonstrably false, and at least one of them was
paid to give that story. All of those statements were
documented at least thirty years after the flight purportedly took place,
And meanwhile, his family, employers, financial backers, and other people
who were working in the field of aeronautics at the
time generally agree that none of his planes ever left
(29:12):
the ground yeah accurately reconstructing exactly when something happened thirty
years or more after it happened. When there's not anything
actually written down about it to jog your memory, that's
kind of a tall order. So in the Smithsonian published
(29:33):
a number of lengthy rebuttals of all the various Whitehead evidence,
and then Scientific American did as well, refuting Whitehead supporters
use of its own past reporting and support for their claims.
So people, basically we're pointing to old Scientific American articles
being like, well, right there, it says that he flew,
(29:53):
and then Scientific American was like, actually, that's not what
it says. Supporters often claimed that the only reason that
the Smithsonian won't seriously consider the possibility of Whitehead beating
the Right Brothers Too Powered flight is that the contract
they signed for the flyer specifies that they won't display
a challenge to the Right Brothers claim to be first. But,
(30:14):
as quoted in The Economist, aeronautics curator Tom Crouch said quote,
should persuasive evidence for a prior flight be presented, my
colleagues and I would have the courage and honesty to
admit the new evidence and risk the loss of the
Right flyer. This whole disagreement did basically lead Ohio and
(30:35):
North Carolina to put aside their differences and basically both
say not Connecticut. Though. One of the things that gets
pointed to a lot in this whole thing is like,
look at how many other articles say this happened. They
can't all be wrong, but like they're all articles that
are spawned from one account. Yeah, they're all reporting one article,
(30:58):
which continues to be an issue in media today when
one thing will come out and a bunch of other
people will re report that one thing without doing any
additional reporting on their own, and then like there's now
there's a story that's faults and everyone believes it. Uh,
do you have solicitor mail? Kind of more. Have an update, okay,
(31:21):
an update on our our episode about the h. L. Hunley,
which literally just came out because the day after it
came out, people started letting us know that the Friends
of the Hunley had issued a press release related to
the research that we talked about in it um. This
is an issue where less than twenty four hours after
(31:44):
our episode came out, new information came out about it,
which doesn't really happen all that often on a history podcast.
Sometimes we'll get like a month or two later, but
that day after thing was just uncanny. Yeah, and it
was vexatious, not only for that reason, UM, because basically
what the press release from the Friends of the Hunley
(32:05):
does is that it uh states that Dr Rachel Lance's
research is incorrect. UH. They said that they considered and
rejected a blast wave as the cause of death for
the creed quite a while ago UM and say that
Dr Lance did not have access to all of their
data to frame her own work when she was doing
that research. But so all of this is kind of
(32:27):
frustrating because it doesn't actually give any detail about why
they have um why they had previously said that a
blast blast wave was not the cause of the death
for the people aboard the Hunley. So the other really
frustrating thing about this press release, besides the fact that
it basically boils down to just saying nah, is that
(32:50):
it describes Dr Lance as a student, even though she
earned her PhD last year and she submitted her paper
to Plus one after she had that PhD. So it
did grow out of PhD dissertation research that she was
doing while she was a student, but it was part
of her PhD dissertation and not like an informal school project.
(33:11):
So the framing of it in this press release makes
it sound like she was maybe an undergrad and this
was some kind of casual activity that she embarked on. UM.
And it's clear from a lot of the comments on
the Facebook post where the Friends of the Hunley shared
this press release initially that a lot of people definitely
(33:33):
read it that way, like there's a lot of really
patronizing Oh, it's cute that the student did some kind
of project on this, but obviously that's not right. Um.
They also originally called it fake news, which, in addition
to being incorrect, is a really politically loaded term at
this point. So I wanted to number one say, okay,
(33:55):
that development happened that day after our our episode came out.
But I also it's really important to note that having
your work scrutinized and assessed by other people is an
important part of science. People make errors, and peer review
is not full proof. So of re testing a hip
hypothesis to confirm whether it's correct, like, that's a critical
(34:17):
part of the scientific method. But that's also not really
what was happening with this press release. The press release,
the most of the detail was just no, it wasn't
and not actual discussion of her methods or conclusions or
anything like that. So at this point, on the one hand,
we have a paper that was submitted to a journal
that shows all of her work and acknowledges its own limitations,
(34:39):
and then on the other hand, we have a press
release saying basically not that's not right, without giving any
detail about why that's not right. So, uh, I'm just
gonna say, if folks want to, you know, refute these
findings or do additional research, great, that is part of
science and discovering things. But it was highly for us
(35:00):
strating to um have this this press release basically offer
no detail and then also frame the whole thing in
a pretty patronizing and dismissive way. It reads really dismissively,
and it mischaracterizes her work, which is That's one of
those things that just gets my hackles up, Like it's
(35:21):
fine to contradict people, but you can't like mischaracterize them
in a way that favors you, even though you have
no evidence, you know, just by trying to like undermine
their credibility. Well, and they may have evidence, they just
didn't know what evidence was. Um, there's a link to
the most recent uh research that's been done um by
(35:45):
I think it was the Navy using data from the
Friends of the Henley and their whole project. But that
report came out before this paper did. So it is
also not a refutation of what's in the paper, because
it's not like it came out before the paper doesn't.
It doesn't say here is why this paper is incorrect
(36:05):
or whatever. Uh So, anyway, that that was irksome, um
but you know, when something happens less than twenty four
hours after your show that came out about it, sometimes
you got to do a little update after a surprisingly
short period of time. Also, apparently at some point in
(36:27):
that episode we said something like nineteen when we really
went meant eighteen. Sometimes we misspeak. Numbers are tricky for me,
like I'm that is what I am most likely to
ever just blurred out the wrong thing. Isn't a year?
Or yeah? Yeah, well you as you and I were
recording the episode today that we recorded one time I
(36:47):
said November when the piece of paper they said October.
So we have all been there. Yeah, we misspeak sometimes.
Um If you would like to write to us about
this or any other podcast where a history podcast that
how Stuff Works dot com. Are also on Facebook at
Facebook dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter
at miss in history. Are Tumbler is missed in History
dot tumbler dot com, and our Pinterest and our Instagram
(37:09):
are both also at missed in History. You can come
to our website, which is missed in history dot com,
where you will find show notes of all of the
episodes that Holly and I have ever worked on together.
Those are now for our newest episodes. They're part of
the actual episode player page, so all that stuff is
all there together, uh And on the episode player page
for this episode, you will also see photos of most
(37:32):
of the aircraft we have talked about uh there in
the in the cover art for that particular episode. So
you can do all that and a whole lot more
at miss in history dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how staff works
dot com
Hey, everybody. Before we get started today, we want to
make sure everyone knows about our upcoming live shows. First up,
Holly will be at Salt Lake Comic Con September one, three.
I won't be able to make it to that one,
so past guest and friend of the show, Brian Young
will be talking with her about Lawn Cheney. Then on
(00:23):
October six pm, we will be appearing as part of
New York Comic Con Presents, and we'll be talking about
the first comic book. You can find out more information
on all of this ticket links everything like that if
you go to missed in History dot com and click
the link that says live shows. Welcome to steph you
(00:45):
missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com.
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tray C. V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Fry So, Holly, you and I
have been hosts of the show for a little over
four years now Is that all? Actually? Now that I
(01:10):
think about it, some patterns have emerged in the comments
that we get when we share stories on particular topics
over those uh coming up on five years, like mentioning
Paul Revere prompts comments about Sybil Lettington, who we talked
about in Six More Impossible Episodes. UH. Posts about George
(01:32):
Gordon Lord Byron usually get replies about his daughter Ada Lovelace,
who has also been the subject of a past episode. UM.
Anytime we post anything about the Right Brothers, we get
lots of comments about other people who are not the
Right Brothers, who we should be talking about. Yeah, various
levels from hey did you know about two? You're horrible
(01:55):
and you ignored these important people. Right. So, one reason
for all these Right Brothers comments is that the Right
Brothers first has a lot of qualifiers on it. People
flew in balloons well before the Rights took to the
air in a plane. There were a lot of gliders
(02:16):
before them, as well as including ones that they designed
while they were working toward powered flight. Powered dirigibles also
predate powered airplanes, and there were also a lot of
heavier than airplanes that managed to get up off the ground,
but not necessarily in a way that you could describe
as flying, its falling with style. Right. So, when people
(02:40):
say that the Right Brothers were first in quotation marks, Uh,
there's a series of very particular circumstances we're talking about.
We're talking about an aircraft heavier than air that achieved
a sustained and controlled and self powered flight with a
person on board. All that stuff together and really a
lot of these distinctions are kind of arbitrary. There's also
(03:00):
some legitimate conversation to be had about just how controlled
the White Wright brothers first flights really were. Uh, there
was some careening involved in some cases. So we're gonna
talk about all of that today and some of the
other folks who come up pretty often as people who
maybe shouldn't be considered to have flown before the Right brothers.
(03:21):
And we're going to say right from the beginning that
all the men that we're talking about today, we're all
really remarkable in their own way, regardless of whether we
get to say first before their achievement. And we also
want to know that even though the people that we're
talking about today are all men, we have a whole
women in Aviation tag on our website that has lots
of groundbreaking female aviators as well. We're not leaving them out,
(03:45):
but we're gonna start just as a level set with
the Wright brothers. So even among people who agree that
they were first, there is still something to disagree on.
And that's whether Ohio, where the Wright brothers were from,
or North Carolina, where they refined their glider designs and
took their first powered flight, should get most of the credit.
Whether this interstate disagreement is good natured or not really
(04:08):
depends on who you ask. And both states have references
to flight, and the Right brothers flyer on their license
plates and their state quarters. So the Right Brothers started
experimenting with flight in the late eight nineties. Wilbert wrote
to the Smithsonian and to ask for all the prior
research that they had on it, saying that he was
quote an enthusiast but not a crank overall, though you know,
(04:33):
aside from talking to the Smithsonian and whatnot, they were
comparatively quiet about what they were doing. Other innovators, including
Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian. We're making very public attempts
at flight, And it was actually Langley that the Smithsonian
first supported as being able to claim first flight status.
The Right brothers, on the other hand, were tinkering, refining,
(04:55):
and learning from their mistakes, all without a lot of fanfare.
This would be come doubly true after their first successful flight,
at which point they became very secretive, especially once they
were embroiled in a patent or over their flight control system.
So the Right Brothers shows the outer banks of North
Carolina as their testing ground because the constant wind helped
(05:16):
with the lift. They first refined the gliders that they
were working on until they were satisfied with their aerodynamics,
and then they turned their attention to power, developing a
lightweight gasoline engine UH and a propeller. The end result
was the six five pound eleven point eight one horsepower Flyer,
which they tried to use for a powered controlled flight
(05:37):
with the person on board on December fourteenth three. This
attempt at kill Devil Hills with Wilbur flying did not
go well. Rather than creating a wheeled undercarriage, they launched
the flyer from a wooden rail, which it traveled down
on a wheeled dolly On December fourteenth, Wilbur climbed too
sharply after leaving that rail, and the flyers stall and crashed.
(06:01):
They had it repaired in time for another attempt on
December three, and at about ten thirty five in the morning,
Orville made a brief and, as we noted at the
top of the show, somewhat careening hundred and twenty ft
or thirty six meter flight stayed aloft for about twelve seconds.
They had set up a camera ahead of time, and
(06:21):
John T. Daniels activated the shutter to take the now
famous picture of the flyer aloft with Wilbur running alongside
of it. They tried three more times that day taking turns,
with their best attempt being there last of the afternoon.
Wilbur flew eight hundred fifty nine feet that's about two
hundred and sixty two in just under a minute. Then
(06:43):
the flyer pitched and, in Orville's words quote darted into
the ground. They sent their father a telegram that night
to tell him the news. Unfortunately, back in their base camp,
a gust of wind flipped the flyer over and wrecked it,
and at that point it was too badly damaged to
be easily repaired, so that put a temporary end to
their attempts at flight. The Rights kept refining and improving
(07:06):
their designs from there, testing and making adjustments as they went.
On October five, n o five, they flew thirty eight
kilometers near Dayton, Ohio in the right Flyer three. This
was its own type of first a flight measured in
kilometers instead of meters was a feat at the time.
Next we are going to talk about perhaps the rights
(07:27):
most fanciful challengers was self taught French engineer and aviator
Claimant Adair. He was born on February four, eighteen forty one,
and like a lot of the other early aviators, he
got his start with ballooning. He made his first heavier
than aircraft in eighteen seventy three, which was pulled on
a tether, kind of like a kite. He also studied
(07:50):
birds and bats, and they would go on to influence
his aircraft designs. Adair's first powered aircraft was a monoplane
that he named aol after Ale of Greek mythology, and
he was granted a patent for it on August eleven.
On October nine, eight ninety it left the ground and
moved about a hundred and sixty five feet that's about
(08:12):
fifty meters, But this wasn't really so much a flight
as it was a hop. He'd successfully made a vessel
that could go in the air and come back down,
but it couldn't stay in the air in any sort
of meaningful way. They're claimed. He made another more successful
attempt in September of the following year, although historians generally
(08:33):
doubt that one actually happened. In a day, was granted
a subsidy from the French Minister of War to work
on another aircraft. The result, after a couple of iterations,
was the Avian three, another monoplane with twin twenty horsepower
steam engines with foot pedals to control the rudder, the
rear wheels, and the speed of the propellers. There was
(08:55):
also a crank that could change the positioning of the wings.
Because aircraft never really made it off the ground. On
October twelfth, it traveled around a circular track in Sassory, France,
but it never really lifted off. It did briefly come
off the track during a test on October fourteenth, but
it didn't remain airborne. This was you could imagine, It's
(09:17):
like if something hit a hit a bump and sort
of leapt up in the air. It was that level
of yea. Because this project was being funded by the
Ministry of War, the government had a representative witnessing these tests,
and that general's assessment that witnessed them was that though
the Aviano three had not successfully flown, those tests should continue.
(09:39):
The Ministry of War disagreed, and it cut its losses
at sixty five thousand francs. The Avon three eventually made
its way to Muse desu Amitier in Paris. But in
nineteen o six, Alberto Santos Dumont, who you're going to
talk about next, made Europe's first public airplane flight. So
(10:00):
clament and Air was really frustrated that he had not
gotten here first, and he started claiming that he had
made a successful flight aboard the Avian three, having gone
at least three or ninety meters during those October fourteen tests.
He offered no substantiation for this claim, though, and it
directly contradicted what the General had reported. Flight historians generally
(10:22):
agree that this is a fabrication trying to get in
on that um that's sweet, sweet first money. Of all
the aircraft that we're talking about today, Adairs looked the
least like a conventional airplane. He fashioned his with wings
pattern after a bat, and the avy On three's propeller
blades looked like feathers. It looks like if a tiny
(10:45):
race of forest creatures in a video game tried to
make an airplane which to me sounds delightful and I
wish they all looked that way. It is pretty delightful.
There will be a picture of it as part of
the art for this on our website. So it doesn't
appear that he ever actually made a successful sustained flight,
but he did succeed in innovated in other areas, including
(11:06):
in telephone technology. He gave a demonstration of his stereo
telephone device at the one Paris Exposition of Electricity, and
he earned a patent for it later that same year.
Adair died into lose a March fifth, ninet. So next
we are going to get to another, uh, pretty fascinating character.
(11:28):
That is Alberto Santos Dumont. We're gonna talk about that
after a break. Unlike claimant Adair, who, as we said earlier,
was self taught, Alberto Santos Dumont was formally trained in
physics and mechanics, as well as in chemistry and an astronomy.
He was born in Brazil on July seventy three, and
(11:51):
he was the son of a wealthy coffee planter. When
he was eighteen, he went to Paris to study. He
was twenty five when he started experimenting ballooning, making his
first ascent in Paris on July four in a balloon
he had named Brazil, and he quickly started trying to
figure out how to build a practical balloon that could
be steered. So at that point, as you may recall
(12:14):
from our numerous episodes on balloon ing, most balloons could
change altitudes, but they were really at the mercy of
the wind when it came to the direction of their travel.
Figuring out how to make a reliably steerable balloon required
him to rethink basically everything from the shape of the
balloon itself, to the materials it was made up, to
the system used to steer, to the engine used to
(12:36):
drive it. He wound up designing his own three point
five horsepower gasoline powered internal combustion engine, that being one
that was safe enough to use an hydrogen filled bag
of gas, which at the time was quite a feat like.
Making an internal combustion engine that was was safe enough
(12:56):
and reliable enough to not set that bag of gas
on fire was a big deal, and the Santos Dumont
number one, his first attempt at a steered balloon, ascended
on September eighteenth. He tinkered with the design and the
Santos Dumont number three ascended on November eighteen nine. He
was able to steer it around the Eiffel Tower several
(13:18):
times before landing. On October nineteenth, nineteen o one, the
Santos Dumont number six took off from Saint Cloud, circled
the Eiffel Tower and returned, and under thirty minutes was
earned the Aero Club of Francis Deutsch prize, which had
been announced more than a year before in an effort
to inspire aeronautical innovation. This prize, which I mean this
(13:40):
was an accomplishment for sure. They basically set this prize
at a hundred thousand francs, which they did because they
didn't think it was actually possible that anybody would pull
it off. So he won that prize and distributed a
quarter of it to his crew and then gave the
rest of it to the Parisian poor. And at first
they actually tried to deny him the prize because it
(14:01):
took a minute in twenty five seconds to secure the
aircraft at the finish line, putting the trek just over
that thirty minute mark. He offered to do the whole
thing over again, and the judging committee ultimately reversed their decision.
So this was the first really effective demonstration of a
practical airship. Previous attempts at airships had been a lot
(14:24):
more limited than this design. But after this success, Santos
S Dumont decided that dirigibles were way too influenced by
weather condition to ever by weather conditions to ever become
a truly workable method of transportation, So he turned his
attention to heavier than airplanes. So back in Brazil, he
designed the fourteen BES or if you're looking at its
(14:46):
fourteen dash b I S and that's a boxy looking
biplane with a twenty four horsepower motor. It looked boxy
because it was designed from box kites, and unlike the
Right Brothers who used a wooden launching rail to become
airble worn, he wanted to make an aircraft that could
take off under its own means. His first attempt to
do so in July of nineteen o six failed, Another
(15:09):
attempt on September seven barely left the ground, and then
a few days later he made a meter off the ground,
And every time he would sort of address the problems
that came up. Whatever he discovered that seemed like it
was preventing him from reaching its successful flight, he would
refine the design and then he would try again. On
October twenty three, nineteen o six, the fourteen Bees took off,
(15:31):
traveled about sixty meters at about three ft in the air,
and then landed. A flight on November twelfth, nineteen o
six flew two and twenty. Both of these were obviously
after the December seventeenth, nine o three Wright Brothers flight,
and he was in fact inspired by that success. The
(15:51):
reason that people point to Alberto Santos Dumont over the
Right Brothers is that this whole distinction of the wheeled
undercarriage on the beasts versus the wooden launching rail that
the Right flyer was using. The argument is that the
Rights flyer doesn't count because the plane relied on separate
pieces to take off rather than an integrated set of
(16:12):
wheels that were actually part of the aircraft. They are
also some very passionate Santos Dumont supporters who argue that
the Rights didn't fly in three at all, suggesting that
all their secrecy was really a cover up, and that
their continued use of a launching rail was evidence that
they had never really perfected their earlier designs. So I
(16:34):
don't know if I would go so far as to
say that's accurate. But in terms of this was a
self contained aircraft that took off under its own power
rather than using a launching rail, I kind of my
opinion is that actually has some merit. Yeah. Santos Dumont
didn't stop with the fourteen Bees. He went on to
design the Demoisille or Dragonfly, a practical light aircraft, and
(16:58):
he published the plans for any one to use to
build their own. But in nineteen ten he was seriously
hurt in a plane crash, and that led to him
having a number of ongoing physical issues and it kept
him from ever flying again. He had also genuinely, passionately
loved flight, and he was terribly dismayed at the growing
use of aircraft in warfare, and he was especially upset
(17:21):
by because he felt like he was personally responsible. There
had been so many developments and aviation that were either
his or that built off of work that he had done.
And in addition to the lingering effects of the nineteen
ten crash, he also became seriously ill. He died by
suicide on July twenty nine, thirty two. In addition to
(17:41):
the aviation awards he earned during his lifetime, he was
a charismatic showman who became something of a celebrity. Contemporary
accounts also described him as flamboyant and somewhat feminine, and
there's been some speculation about what his sexual orientation might
have been. Today, he is still a highly feered figure
in Brazil, known as the father of the Brazilian Air Force.
(18:04):
Multiple roads and schools, as well as the town he
was born in, have been named after him. Now we
will move on to Richard Pierce, who, for our first
year or so on the show, was the person most
often mentioned when we brought up the Right Brothers. He
was a New Zealand aviation pioneer born on December three,
(18:25):
eight seventy seven. He was a mostly self taught inventor
and farmer, and he was granted his first patent in
nineteen o two for a new style of bicycle that
used pedals that you pushed up and down rather than
in a circle. He invented a lot of other devices
to including a potato planter and a needle threader. Thinking
(18:46):
about what it would be like to ride a bike
where you had to push the pedals up and down.
It's kind of like a StairMaster bike. That seems sort
of mean, but probably not uh. He was also working
on ideas for powered flight. His first airplay design was
a low profile monoplane made of bamboo wire, canvas and
steel tubing. On his first attempt to fly it, he
(19:08):
took off from the road adjacent to his farm on
the South Island. He flew fifty yards or so and
then he crashed into a gorse fence. So there were
some witnesses to this flight. It definitely happened, but the
details aren't recorded in any kind of official account, so
there has been a whole lot of debate about exactly
when this flight happened. Pierce was a bit of a loaner.
(19:30):
He never married, There weren't really people that he talked
to day to day about his work, and he also
didn't keep a lot of written records or notes. Then
most cases, when it comes to things that he worked on,
patent applications are the only remaining documentation of what he
was doing, and this is also why we have way
less to share about his process than most of the
(19:50):
other aviators were talking about today. Much later, in nineteen
fifteen and nineteen eighteen, he wrote two different letters in
which he remembered the flying having happened in February or
March of nineteen o four. Researchers reconstructed various bits of
eyewitness testimony to arrive at a date of March thirty one,
(20:11):
nineteen o three, although some have also argued that it
was actually in nineteen o two. And this is why
for the first year or so after we joined the show,
he was the person so often cited as a counter
argument to the Right brothers. However, in fourteen, while doing
while doing research for a book on Pierce aviation, historian
(20:34):
Errol Martin found an old article published in the Timoroo
Post on November seventeenth of nineteen o nine, and in
this article, Pierce himself contradicts the idea that he was
flying anywhere close to the time that the Wright brothers did.
As he said to the reporter quote, I did not
attempt anything practical with the idea until in nineteen o
(20:54):
four the St. Louis Exposition authorities offered a prize of
twenty thousand dollars to the in to the man who
invented and flew a flying machine over a specified course.
I did not, as you know, succeed in winning the prize.
Neither did anybody. He went on to describe some tests
of the machine that he was currently working on, a
(21:15):
comparatively lightweight craft powered by a twenty five horsepower engine
that he had designed himself, along with the rest of
the planes components. Even the tests that he described to
this reporter were more like hops than true sustained flight,
and Errol Martin suspected that the reason that the nineteen
o two or nineteen o three date persisted for as
(21:35):
long as it did was because people were looking for
substantiation that that flight occurred somewhere around that time, not
six or seven years later. Pierce himself also said that
he didn't fly before the Right Brothers, and that he
became motivated to work on his own aircraft after their successes.
So the counter argument that we've heard most often in
(21:58):
response to Richard Pierce saying that he had not beaten
the Right Brothers was that he was just being nice.
He may have been lovely, he may have just been
being nice, but like that's not a very substantive counter
argument right, uh, and Pierce died in christ Church on July.
(22:24):
Most of the other men we've talked about today wound
up influencing the greater field of aviation in some way,
regardless of whether their attempts at controlled powered flight were
really all that successful. And this was less true for
Richard Pierce, but it was only because being in New
Zealand put him really far away from where most of
that work was happening. His plane, though, was pretty sophisticated
(22:47):
for the time. It had wing flaps, a rear elevator
and a wheeled steerable undercarriage and a propeller with variable
pitch blades. Because he was so physically removed for most
of the other people physically doing this work, though not
a lot of people who were trying to come up
with workable aircraft actually saw it or got to learn
from it. Yeah, it makes you wonder if he were
(23:09):
closer to those people, if his innovations wouldn't have accelerated
the development of flight in a very serious way. And
for a time after his death, Pierce's work was nearly forgotten. Fortunately,
knowledge of his efforts did survive. An auctioneer offered his
last plane to the Canterbury Aero Club, and aviation engineer
George Bolt later bought it and donated it to the
(23:31):
Museum of Transport and Technology in Auckland, where a replica
is now part of their collection. Although it seems unlikely
that Pierce achieved true sustained flight in his aircraft, modern
replicas powered with ultralight aircraft engines have been capable of flight.
So we're going to take one more quick sponsor break
before we talk about our last first flight, which was
(23:55):
by Gustav Whitehead. So in a weird little irony, Gustav
Whitehead is not the name who is most often tossed
out when we mentioned the right brothers, but he is
the aviation pioneer who has gotten a lot of the
most first in flight attention in recent years, particularly in
(24:17):
the United States. He was born on January first, eighteen
seventy four, and immigrated to the United States from Bavaria.
He settled in Connecticut and changed his surname to Whitehead
from Viskoff. The idea that Whitehead might have flown first
has come up periodically since the nineteen teens, and the
most recent big wave of attention came in and that's
(24:41):
when editor Paul Jackson endorsed the idea that the credit
should go to Whitehead in the centennial edition of Jane's
All the World's Aircraft. Australian John Brown launched the website
Gustav dash whitehead dot com that same year, laying out
various pieces of evidence that Whitehead was the first to fly,
including what's purportedly a piece of photographic evidence. So here
(25:04):
are the claims. On August eighteenth, nineteen o one, the
Bridgeport Sunday Harold reported that Whitehead had made a half
mile flight four days before on August fourteen, aboard a
very bird like monoplane known as Number twenty one, and
as still happens today, other publications picked up this story
and mirrored it in their own pages without doing any
(25:28):
additional reporting of their own on it. This report listed
to ben as having helped Whitehead in this effort, and
those were James Dickey and Andrew Steely. In an article
An American Inventor published April first, nineteen o two, Whitehead
himself also claimed to have flown for several miles over
Long Island on January seventeenth of that year. He claimed
(25:51):
that flight and another shorter one took place on the
same day. From there, Whitehead made a failed bid to
enter an aircraft in the aeronautical Company Titian at the
Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in nineteen o four.
That was the same one that Richard Pierce referenced in
his nineteen o nine newspaper interview. Whitehead built several other
aircraft between nineteen o six and nineteen o nine, none
(26:14):
of which, ever, apparently flew. When a Scientific American reporter
visited him in nineteen o three, he was actually working
on a glider and not on a powered aircraft. There
were doubts about his claims even at the time. A
much different article appeared in the Bridgeport Evening Farmer in
nineteen o two, titled Unrealized Dreams Last Flop of the
(26:37):
Whitehead Flying Machine. It detailed the various grapes of Whitehead's
financial backer, Herman Lindy, who had invested six thousand dollars
in two machines and was disappointed in the fact that
neither of them could actually fly. The Bridgeport Post published
a similar critical article on the same day. Whitehead died
(26:58):
on October tenth, seven and then in the nineteen thirties,
somebody stumbled over that initial article that had reported that
he had a successful flight, so people started trying to
track down confirmation of whether he had flown or not.
Andrew Seely could not be located when he wasn't listed
in any local directories. They did, however, find James Dickey,
(27:19):
who not only said he had not witnessed the flight,
but also said he was not even there. He did
not know any Andrew Seeley, and he had never even
heard of any flight and that or any other Whitehead aircraft.
When an interviewer tracked him down in nineteen thirty six,
he said, quote, I believe the entire story of the
Herald was imaginary and grew out of the comments Whitehead
(27:41):
discussing what he hoped to get from his plane. It's
also impossible to go back and review Whitehead's notes and
schematics to try to replicate his aircraft and see if
it actually worked, because he didn't leave any A few
photographs do exist of his nineteen o one machine, although
all of those show it on the ground and not
in the air. No photograph is known to exist to
(28:03):
the machine that purportedly flew several miles in nineteen o two,
and no photographs exist of one of his aircraft in flight.
There are photos of an unpowered glider as well as
one that was flown without a person aboard. This new
in quotation Mark's photo evidence that was alluded to is
a really heavily enlarged detail of an exhibition that was
(28:28):
shown at the Aero Club of America in January nineteen
o six. This vastly zoomed in on picture shows a
white blob shaped roughly like one of Whitehead's airplanes when
viewed from above. People looking to support Whitehead's claims did
interview a number of witnesses between nineteen thirty four and
nineteen seventy four. However, their statements contradict one another or
(28:51):
they're demonstrably false, and at least one of them was
paid to give that story. All of those statements were
documented at least thirty years after the flight purportedly took place,
And meanwhile, his family, employers, financial backers, and other people
who were working in the field of aeronautics at the
time generally agree that none of his planes ever left
(29:12):
the ground yeah accurately reconstructing exactly when something happened thirty
years or more after it happened. When there's not anything
actually written down about it to jog your memory, that's
kind of a tall order. So in the Smithsonian published
(29:33):
a number of lengthy rebuttals of all the various Whitehead evidence,
and then Scientific American did as well, refuting Whitehead supporters
use of its own past reporting and support for their claims.
So people, basically we're pointing to old Scientific American articles
being like, well, right there, it says that he flew,
(29:53):
and then Scientific American was like, actually, that's not what
it says. Supporters often claimed that the only reason that
the Smithsonian won't seriously consider the possibility of Whitehead beating
the Right Brothers Too Powered flight is that the contract
they signed for the flyer specifies that they won't display
a challenge to the Right Brothers claim to be first. But,
(30:14):
as quoted in The Economist, aeronautics curator Tom Crouch said quote,
should persuasive evidence for a prior flight be presented, my
colleagues and I would have the courage and honesty to
admit the new evidence and risk the loss of the
Right flyer. This whole disagreement did basically lead Ohio and
(30:35):
North Carolina to put aside their differences and basically both
say not Connecticut. Though. One of the things that gets
pointed to a lot in this whole thing is like,
look at how many other articles say this happened. They
can't all be wrong, but like they're all articles that
are spawned from one account. Yeah, they're all reporting one article,
(30:58):
which continues to be an issue in media today when
one thing will come out and a bunch of other
people will re report that one thing without doing any
additional reporting on their own, and then like there's now
there's a story that's faults and everyone believes it. Uh,
do you have solicitor mail? Kind of more. Have an update, okay,
(31:21):
an update on our our episode about the h. L. Hunley,
which literally just came out because the day after it
came out, people started letting us know that the Friends
of the Hunley had issued a press release related to
the research that we talked about in it um. This
is an issue where less than twenty four hours after
(31:44):
our episode came out, new information came out about it,
which doesn't really happen all that often on a history podcast.
Sometimes we'll get like a month or two later, but
that day after thing was just uncanny. Yeah, and it
was vexatious, not only for that reason, UM, because basically
what the press release from the Friends of the Hunley
(32:05):
does is that it uh states that Dr Rachel Lance's
research is incorrect. UH. They said that they considered and
rejected a blast wave as the cause of death for
the creed quite a while ago UM and say that
Dr Lance did not have access to all of their
data to frame her own work when she was doing
that research. But so all of this is kind of
(32:27):
frustrating because it doesn't actually give any detail about why
they have um why they had previously said that a
blast blast wave was not the cause of the death
for the people aboard the Hunley. So the other really
frustrating thing about this press release, besides the fact that
it basically boils down to just saying nah, is that
(32:50):
it describes Dr Lance as a student, even though she
earned her PhD last year and she submitted her paper
to Plus one after she had that PhD. So it
did grow out of PhD dissertation research that she was
doing while she was a student, but it was part
of her PhD dissertation and not like an informal school project.
(33:11):
So the framing of it in this press release makes
it sound like she was maybe an undergrad and this
was some kind of casual activity that she embarked on. UM.
And it's clear from a lot of the comments on
the Facebook post where the Friends of the Hunley shared
this press release initially that a lot of people definitely
(33:33):
read it that way, like there's a lot of really
patronizing Oh, it's cute that the student did some kind
of project on this, but obviously that's not right. Um.
They also originally called it fake news, which, in addition
to being incorrect, is a really politically loaded term at
this point. So I wanted to number one say, okay,
(33:55):
that development happened that day after our our episode came out.
But I also it's really important to note that having
your work scrutinized and assessed by other people is an
important part of science. People make errors, and peer review
is not full proof. So of re testing a hip
hypothesis to confirm whether it's correct, like, that's a critical
(34:17):
part of the scientific method. But that's also not really
what was happening with this press release. The press release,
the most of the detail was just no, it wasn't
and not actual discussion of her methods or conclusions or
anything like that. So at this point, on the one hand,
we have a paper that was submitted to a journal
that shows all of her work and acknowledges its own limitations,
(34:39):
and then on the other hand, we have a press
release saying basically not that's not right, without giving any
detail about why that's not right. So, uh, I'm just
gonna say, if folks want to, you know, refute these
findings or do additional research, great, that is part of
science and discovering things. But it was highly for us
(35:00):
strating to um have this this press release basically offer
no detail and then also frame the whole thing in
a pretty patronizing and dismissive way. It reads really dismissively,
and it mischaracterizes her work, which is That's one of
those things that just gets my hackles up, Like it's
(35:21):
fine to contradict people, but you can't like mischaracterize them
in a way that favors you, even though you have
no evidence, you know, just by trying to like undermine
their credibility. Well, and they may have evidence, they just
didn't know what evidence was. Um, there's a link to
the most recent uh research that's been done um by
(35:45):
I think it was the Navy using data from the
Friends of the Henley and their whole project. But that
report came out before this paper did. So it is
also not a refutation of what's in the paper, because
it's not like it came out before the paper doesn't.
It doesn't say here is why this paper is incorrect
(36:05):
or whatever. Uh So, anyway, that that was irksome, um
but you know, when something happens less than twenty four
hours after your show that came out about it, sometimes
you got to do a little update after a surprisingly
short period of time. Also, apparently at some point in
(36:27):
that episode we said something like nineteen when we really
went meant eighteen. Sometimes we misspeak. Numbers are tricky for me,
like I'm that is what I am most likely to
ever just blurred out the wrong thing. Isn't a year?
Or yeah? Yeah, well you as you and I were
recording the episode today that we recorded one time I
(36:47):
said November when the piece of paper they said October.
So we have all been there. Yeah, we misspeak sometimes.
Um If you would like to write to us about
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(37:09):
are both also at missed in History. You can come
to our website, which is missed in history dot com,
where you will find show notes of all of the
episodes that Holly and I have ever worked on together.
Those are now for our newest episodes. They're part of
the actual episode player page, so all that stuff is
all there together, uh And on the episode player page
for this episode, you will also see photos of most
(37:32):
of the aircraft we have talked about uh there in
the in the cover art for that particular episode. So
you can do all that and a whole lot more
at miss in history dot com for more on this
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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