In a small hangar here not far from the Long Island Sound sits a very strange-looking plane.
Its nylon wings, folded backed to fit inside the hangar, are connected to an open-air wood-frame fuselage not much bigger than a coffin. Two propellers sit in front of the wings, and the fragile contraption is tied together with boat riggings.
When fully unfurled, the plane measures 36 feet from front to rear with a 35-foot wing span. It looks like a huge white bat that has been attached to a canvas-covered canoe.
In fact, it is a copy of a monoplane built by an obscure turn-of-the-century air pioneer named Gustave Whitehead. Some people believe it was the first plane to leave the ground in controlled, sustained, powered flight.
History, of course, teaches us that the Wright brothers invented the airplane when they nudged their rickety biplane into the air for 12 seconds over the windswept sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, N.C., on Dec. 17, 1903.
But Whitehead`s present-day adherents contend that Whitehead first flew on Aug. 14, 1901–more than two years before the Wright brothers, and that has created a minor disturbance in the sometimes turbulent and close-knit world of aerospace historians.
To bolster their claim, Whitehead`s supporters have rebuilt his plane to show that it was capable of flight. So far, they have gotten it off the ground tethered to a car–something akin to an attached glider. The next step is to install a motor and see if it flies on its own. That crucial test is planned for some time in October.
Even if the plane flies, supporters concede, that would not prove that Whitehead invented the airplane. But they say it will go a long way toward debunking his critics, foremost among them Orville Wright himself.
Commenting on the Whitehead claim in a 1937 letter, Wright wrote, ”In the case of Whitehead, the design of the machine is in itself enough to refute the statements that the machine flew.”
”As a professional skilled pilot, there`s no way you can look at an aircraft and see if it can fly,” contends William O`Dwyer, a retired Air Force major who is the leading force behind the Whitehead claim. ”The only way you can do that is putting it through studies. We now know the plane is aeronautically capable of sustained, stable flight. It flies.”
O`Dwyer, a voluble, vigorous man of 65, has spent more than 20 years trying to give Whitehead a place in history. With the zeal of a true believer, the Fairfield, Conn., native has painstakingly gathered eyewitness accounts, documents, photographs and contemporary articles that argue Whitehead`s cause. ”If you look at all the evidence Bill O`Dwyer has, I don`t see how you can`t believe it,” said Andy Kosch, a high school biology teacher and hang-glider instructor in charge of building the replica. ”Either that or there`s an awful lot of liars around.”
However, O`Dwyer`s efforts have done little to change the opinion of historians. They dismiss Whitehead`s claim because, unlike the Wrights, he left no photographs and few notes to document his work.
Indeed, any investigation into the Whitehead case inevitably becomes tangled in a welter of conflicting claims that, because of the passage of time, may never be resolved. Still, historians acknowledge that Whitehead presents a tantalizing and puzzling case.
”The Whitehead claim has lasted the longest because it`s the most intriguing and complex,” said Tom Crouch, curator of engineering and industry at the Smithsonian`s National Museum of American History and a former curator of aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum. ”But when you begin to dissect it, the story begins to fall apart.”
Gustave Whitehead was a German immigrant who arrived in Bridgeport around 1900 after experimenting with flying machines in Boston, Baltimore and Pittsburgh. Then 26, he took a job as a night watchman and tinkered in his shed by day.
In numerous affidavits accumulated by O`Dwyer and Stella Randolph, who wrote a book on Whitehead in 1937, former assistants and residents of that era say it was not uncommon to see Whitehead taking short aerial hops around the city in his small monoplane. According to these accounts, Whitehead often flew along the Long Island Sound, once flying for a distance of seven miles.
The strongest evidence for Whitehead is an eyewitness account in the Bridgeport Sunday Herald of Aug. 18, 1901, that purports to describe a flight Whitehead took in his plane four days earlier. The author, Richard Howell, tells how Whitehead piloted the craft for a half-mile and, by shifting his weight, was able to steer the plane around a clump of trees.
Several stories subsequently appeared in Scientific American describing Whitehead`s flights. In the Sept. 19, 1903, issue–three months before the Wrights flew at Kitty Hawk–the magazine carried this report on Whitehead`s experiments:
”By running with the machine against the wind, after the motor had been started, the aeroplane was made to skim along above the ground at heights of from 3 to 16 feet for a distance, without the operator touching, of about 350 yards.”
Scholars, however, remain skeptical. They dismiss the affidavits, saying they were made decades after the fact, often by people who were only children at the turn of the century.
As for the article in the Sunday Herald, Crouch called it ”puzzling,”
but he added, ”Around the turn of the century, the hoax was a staple of American journalism.”
He also noted that in 1936 a Harvard economics graduate named John Crane, writing about the Whitehead claim, looked for the two witnesses mentioned in the Howell article. One called the flight a hoax and the second could not be found, and Crane decided that Whitehead never flew. (Typical of this case, Crane wrote a second article several years later in which he backtracked from that assessment.)
”What you could say about Whitehead was that he was a serious experimenter,” said Crouch, a native of Dayton, Ohio (the Wrights` hometown), who is writing a biography of the Wright brothers. ”But I don`t think he got off the ground in 1901 or later. There just are too many people who gave him money and watched his experiments who said he didn`t do it.”
Others, like Peter Jakab, current curator of aeronautics at the Smithsonian, say even if Whitehead did get into the air, it may not be significant.
”At best, he may have made some uncontrolled hops, but not any sustained controlled flights which is what would be needed for invention of the airplane,” Jakab said.
This historical argument could be solved if there were a photograph of Whitehead in flight. After all, it was the famous photo of the Wright Flyer a few feet off the ground at Kitty Hawk that solidified the Wrights` claim to immortality.
No such photo has been found, but there are intriguing hints that one may have existed. The Oct. 1, 1904, edition of the Bridgeport Daily Standard contained an article that said:
”If anyone doubts that Gustave Whitehead has been able to fly a limited distance, at least, with his aeroplane, such doubt can be dispelled by viewing the photographs of his flight in the south window of Lyon & Grumman`s hardware store on Main street.”
And in 1906, an article in Scientific American on an exhibit of the Aero Club of America said: ”A single blurred photograph of a large birdlike machine propelled by compressed air, and which was constructed by Whitehead in 1901, was the only other photograph besides that of (air pioneer Samuel)
Langley`s machine of a motor-driven aeroplane in successful flight.”
Discovery of this article led O`Dwyer on an intensive search that uncovered a photo of that exhibit–ironically, in Crouch`s book, ”A Dream of Wings.” O`Dwyer enlarged the photo to reveal, hanging on a distant wall, four known photos of the Whitehead plane on the ground. Above and to the right is a fifth photo, badly out of focus, that appears to be a landscape, but it is impossible to tell whether it includes a plane in flight.
To O`Dwyer, that blurry enlargement is one more example that Whitehead probably flew. To scholars, it is just another inconclusive piece of a curious puzzle.
”I can`t believe a guy in 1901 would get off the ground, have a photograph and not show it to the whole world,” Crouch said. ”He lived into the 1920s. He certainly had plenty of opportunity to say, `Look at this picture of me off the ground before the Wright brothers.”`
Complicating the controversy is a bitter feud that has developed between O`Dwyer and the Smithsonian Institution. O`Dwyer contends the museum has covered up evidence that could help Whitehead`s claim.
He cites a contract signed in 1948 with the Wright estate under which the Smithsonian accepted the original Wright Flyer for display. Under its terms, the Smithsonian agreed not to publicize any claim that challenged the Wrights` contention that they were the first to fly ”in controlled flight.”
Smithsonian officials confirm that the agreement exists. But they say it was written into the contract because for nearly 40 years, the Smithsonian had refused to recognize the Wrights` claim out of loyalty to Samuel Langley, a former secretary of the Smithsonian and a Wright rival in the early 1900s.
”If it was demonstrated that Whitehead or anyone flew before the Wright brothers, we would not hide that fact to save an artifact,” Jakab said.
O`Dwyer also persuaded the Connecticut legislature earlier this year to pass a resolution urging the Smithsonian to hold a public hearing on the matter. But the museum declined because, Jakab said, that is not the way scholarly issues are decided.
Thus, the riddle of Gustave Whitehead remains unresolved.
If he was in fact the first to fly, why did he not press his claim in his lifetime? Why did he later abandon the plane that supposedly made the first historic flight? On the other hand, how can scholars discount the weight of eyewitness and press reports of the day?
Was Whitehead, as scholars insist, a back yard tinkerer who never left the ground? Or was he, as O`Dwyer contends, an absent-minded genius who never bothered to record his flights or document his experiments?
After his early flights, Whitehead drifted away from building airplanes. He was a poor businessman, according to O`Dwyer, and soon ran out of money. He finally found a new backer, but one who was more interested in gliders than planes; so gliders are what Whitehead built.
Eventually, Whitehead made airplane motors, some of which were used by other early air pioneers. In later years he became a mechanic, then a radio repairman and then went to work for the local highway department.
He died in obscurity in 1927 with $8 in his pocket.
