Gustave Whitehead
Gustave Albin Whitehead was a German–American aviation pioneer. Between 1897 and 1915, he designed and built gliders, flying machines, and engines. Controversy surrounds published accounts and Whitehead's own claims that he flew a powered machine successfully several times in 1901 and 1902, predating the first flights by the Wright brothers in 1903.
Much of Whitehead's reputation rests on a newspaper article which was written as an eyewitness report and describes his powered and sustained flight in Connecticut on 14 August 1901. Over a hundred newspapers in the U.S. and around the world soon repeated information from the article. Several local newspapers also reported on other flight experiments that Whitehead made in 1901 and subsequent years. Whitehead's aircraft designs and experiments were described or mentioned in Scientific American articles and a 1904 book about industrial progress. His public profile faded after about 1915, however, and he died in relative obscurity in 1927.
In the 1930s, a magazine article and book asserted that Whitehead had made powered flights in 1901–1902, and the book includes statements from people who said that they had seen various Whitehead flights decades earlier. These published accounts triggered debate among scholars, researchers, and aviation enthusiasts. Mainstream historians have consistently dismissed the Whitehead flight claims, which Orville Wright later described as 'mythical'.
Researchers have studied and attempted to copy Whitehead's aircraft. Since the 1980s, enthusiasts in the U.S. and Germany have built and flown replicas of Whitehead's No. 21 machine using modern engines and modern propellers, and with fundamental changes to the aircraft structure and control systems.
Early life and career
Whitehead was born in Leutershausen, Bavaria, the second child of Karl Weisskopf and his wife Babetta. As a boy he showed an interest in flight, experimenting with kites and earning the nickname "the flyer". He and a friend caught and tethered birds in an attempt to learn how they flew, an activity which the police soon stopped.His parents died in 1886 and 1887, when he was a boy. He then trained as a mechanic and traveled to Hamburg, where in 1888 he was forced to join the crew of a sailing ship. A year later he returned to Germany, then journeyed with a family to Brazil. He went to sea again for several years, learning more about wind, weather and bird flight.
Weisskopf arrived in the U.S. in 1893. He soon anglicized his name to Gustave Whitehead. The New York toy manufacturer E. J. Horsman hired Whitehead to build and operate advertising kites and model gliders. Whitehead also made plans to add a motor to propel one of his gliders. In 1893, Whitehead was in Boston where he experimented with gliders, kites, and models, and where he worked at Harvard's kite-flying meteorological station.
In 1896, Whitehead was hired as a mechanic for the Boston Aeronautical Society. He and mechanic Albert B. C. Horn built a Lilienthal-type glider and an ornithopter. Whitehead made a few short and low flights in the glider, but did not succeed in flying the ornithopter. Also in 1896, founding Society member Samuel Cabot employed Whitehead and carpenter James Crowell to build a Lilienthal glider. Cabot reported to the Society that tests with this glider were unsuccessful.
Claims to powered flight
1899
According to an affidavit given in 1934 by Louis Darvarich, a friend of Whitehead, the two men made a motorized flight of about half a mile in Pittsburgh's Schenley Park in April or May 1899. Darvarich said they flew at a height of in a steam-powered monoplane aircraft and crashed into a brick building. Darvarich said he was stoking the aircraft's boiler aboard the craft and was badly scalded in the accident, requiring several weeks in a hospital. Because of this incident, Whitehead was allegedly forbidden by the police to perform any more experiments in Pittsburgh. Aviation historian William F. Trimble, pointing to a lack of contemporary proof, dismissed this story in 1982 as a case of "overactive imaginations." Whitehead's stated control method – a shifting of body weight – was said by Trimble to be insufficient to control a powered aircraft, and the supposed charcoal-fired steam powerplant could not have been powerful enough to lift itself off the ground. Whitehead was quoted in Pittsburgh newspapers in December 1899 as still constructing an aircraft, although he did say that he had flown it in Boston. A local historian claimed in 2015 that his research has uncovered evidence of the purported 1899 flight.Whitehead and Darvarich traveled to Bridgeport, Connecticut, to find factory jobs.
1901
A description and photographs of Whitehead's aircraft appeared in Scientific American in June 1901, stating that the "novel flying machine" had just been completed, and was "now ready for preliminary trials."Whitehead said he tested his unmanned machine on 3 May, according to a newspaper report.
He said in the first test the machine carried 220 pounds of sand ballast and flew to an altitude of 40 to 50 feet for 1/8 of a mile. On the second test Whitehead said the machine flew a distance of 1/2 mile for one and a half minutes before crashing into a tree. The report said Andrew Cellie and Daniel Varovi were Whitehead's financial backers and assistants. Whitehead expressed his desire to keep the location of any future experiments hidden to avoid drawing a crowd that might make a "snap-shot verdict of failure".
The claimed aviation event for which Whitehead is now best known reportedly took place in Fairfield, Connecticut, on 14 August 1901 and was described at length in an article in the edition of 18 August 1901 of the weekly Bridgeport Herald newspaper. The article, written as an eyewitness report, stated that Whitehead piloted his Number 21 aircraft in a controlled powered flight for about half a mile, reaching a height of and landing safely. The unsigned article is widely attributed to journalist Richard Howell, later the newspaper's editor. The flight, if it actually took place, preceded the Wright brothers' first powered flights in the Wright Flyer near Kitty Hawk in 1903 by more than two years, and exceeded the best one, which covered at a height of about.
The article was accompanied by a drawing, also credited by some Whitehead researchers to Howell, which depicted the aircraft in flight. The drawing was purportedly based on a photograph, which is believed not to exist. Information from the article was reprinted in the New York Herald, Boston Transcript and The Washington Times, which ran it on 23 August 1901. In the following months, dozens of other newspapers around the world published articles mentioning the reported flight or other aviation activity by Whitehead.
The Bridgeport Herald reported that Whitehead and another man drove to the testing area in the machine, which, when the wings were folded along its sides, functioned as a car. Two other people, including the newspaper reporter, followed on bicycles. For short distances, the Number 21's speed was close to thirty miles an hour on the uneven road, and the article said, "there seems no doubt that the machine can reel off forty miles an hour and not exert the engine to its fullest capacity.".
The newspaper reported that before attempting to pilot the aircraft, Whitehead successfully test flew it unmanned, using tether ropes and sandbag ballast. When Whitehead was ready to make a manned flight, the article said: "By this time the light was good. Faint traces of the rising sun began to suggest themselves in the east."
According to the newspaper article, trees blocked the way after the flight had started. Whitehead was quoted as saying, "I knew that I could not clear them by rising higher, and also that I had no means of steering around them by using the machinery." The article said Whitehead quickly thought of a solution to steer around the trees:
He simply shifted his weight more to one side than the other. This careened the ship to one side. She turned her nose away from the clump of sprouts when within fifty yards of them and took her course around them as prettily as a yacht on the sea avoids a bar. The ability to control the air ship in this manner appeared to give Whitehead confidence, for he was seen to take time to look at the landscape about him. He looked back and waved his hand exclaiming, 'I've got it at last.'
When Whitehead neared the end of a field, the article said he turned off the motor and the aircraft landed "so lightly that Whitehead was not jarred in the least."
Junius Harworth, who as a boy was one of Whitehead's helpers, said Whitehead flew the airplane at another time in mid-1901 from Howard Avenue East to Wordin Avenue, along the edge of property belonging to the local gas company. Upon landing, Harworth said, the machine was turned around and another hop was made back to the starting point.
On 21 September 1901, Collier's Weekly ran a picture of Whitehead's "latest flying machine" and said that he "recently made a successful flight of half a mile". On 19 November 1901, The Evening World ran a story about Whitehead's achievements and included a photograph of him sitting on his new flying machine. The article quotes him saying, "within a year people will be buying airships as freely as they are buying automobiles today and the sky will be dotted with figures skimming the air". On 7 December 1901, the Coconino Sun ran a story that stated Gustave Whitehead was the "inventor of the flying machine" and was planning a flight to New York.
During this period of activity, Whitehead also reportedly tested an unmanned and unpowered flying machine, towed by men pulling ropes. A witness said the craft rose above telephone lines, flew across a road and landed undamaged. The distance covered was later measured at approximately.