WILMINGTON – The Wright Brothers have the name recognition, but they actually may not have been the first to achieve powered flight.
Gustave Albin Whitehead, a German immigrant, designed and built many different flying machines during the late 1800s/early 1900s, and he claims (with supporting testimony of eye-witnesses) to have flown his own plane in 1901 – A full two years before the Wright Brothers achieved flight in Kitty Hawk, NC on December 17th of 1903 (although don’t remind folks from Ohio about that).
So why isn’t Gustave’s flying machine on our license plates?
A photo.
Gustave’s account of that first flight comes mainly from a newspaper article written as an eyewitness report of the event.
According to the Bridgeport Herald newspaper, the flight took place on August 14th, 1901 in Fairfield, Connecticut.
The article describes how Gustave flew his flying machine for approximately one-half mile before gracefully landing back on the ground.
Not only would this make Gustave the first to have achieved powered flight, but this flight (approximately 2600 feet and 50 feet high) dwarfed the Wright Brother’s famous 852 feet long, 10 feet high flight in Kitty Hawk.
The report was picked up and repeated by over 100 newspapers around the country and Gustave’s aircraft designs and subsequent flight experiments were also recorded in a 1904 book about industrial innovations.
However, although written about relatively extensively at the time, no photograph showing Gustave making the flight is confirmed to exist.
Pictures of the plane itself did appear in a 1901 issue of Scientific American, but there have only been drawings made to show the plane in action.
When the Wright Brothers first flew in Kitty Hawk two years later, a photo was snapped of the plane in mid-flight – proving the event really happened – by an employee of the U.S. Life-Saving Service.
That photo became iconic and would go on to represent the birth of aviation for the world, with the Wright Brothers forever being attached to it and Gustave dying in relative obscurity in 1927.
A picture is worth a thousand words and a lifetime of name recognition.
