Showing posts tagged as: Wright Brothers
A Female Helicopter Trailblazer, the “Whirly Girls” and the Struggle for a Place in the Cockpit: Women in the ‘Contrails’ of Modern Aviation
When the first men managed through repeated trial-and-error to get manned “flying machines” off the ground, the first women pioneers weren’t that far behind them in getting into the skies. The first woman got her flying licence (Elise Deroche in France) less than nine years after the Wright brothers made their epic 59-second ‘hop’ – see the 2017 brace of articles elsewhere on this blogsite, Equality at 10,000 Feet: The Pioneer Aviatrix in the Golden Age of Aviation – Part I (May 27, 2017) and Part II (May 31, 2017).
Baroness Derouche (Source: This Day in Aviation)
While many women overcame obstacles on the way to a career as an aviatrix, those of their sex wanting to become helicopter pilots have found it even more difficult and onerous. The prospects around 1940 when the world’s first modern rotary-wing copter became fully functional looked bright enough for women. Nazi Germany’s pioneering aviatrix Hanna Reitsch was leading the way. In 1938 Reitsch☸ became the first woman to test fly a helicopter, Focke’s FW-61 helicopter, even going on to set a distance record for helicopter flight of 109km. She followed that up with the record (shared with another pilot) for being the first in the world to fly a copter in an enclosed space❇ (Sophie Jackson, Hitler’s Heroine, Hanna Reitsch (2014)).
Unfortunately, as the industry has grown since those formative days, female helicopter pilots trying to follow the trajectory of Reitsch’s stellar achievements in the air have found it much harder to penetrate the masculine preserve of the helicopter world. Today women still lag far behind in the gender stakes, in 2019 according to the Civil Aviation Authority women made up only 4.5% of the helicopter pilots in the UK, with just the single female instructor-examiner for the whole country (“International Women’s Day: ‘I’m teaching other women to fly helicopters’”, BBC, 08-Mar-2019, www.bbc.com).
(Photo: Stephanie Wallace/IMdiversity)The statistics are hardly more encouraging in the US. The Helicopter Association International puts the number of female pilots at around 5%, the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) which pointedly has no specific data on women helicopter pilots estimates the figure at a perhaps generous 7.9%. (‘How These 2 Women Became The Helicopter Pilot and Reporter Inside Skyeye’, ABC13, 11-Mar-2021, www.abc13.com). Even more concerning, the percentage of women behind the controls has been stagnant over recent decades✴.
But it’s not from the lack of trying to effect change on the part of women aviators! The barriers to female entry into both the commercial and military fields of helicopters led pilot Jean Ross Howard Phelan (above), the 8th US woman to gain her helicopter accreditation, to form Whirly Girls International in 1955—an association dedicated to the advancement of women in helicopter aviation—with just 12 other charter members🈂. Today the group has 72,000 members from 44 countries.
The minuscule inroads made by women inside the sanctum of the “male cockpit” isn’t confined to rotary-wing aircraft. Women pilots have barely had more success in cracking the fixed-wing aircraft industry, their share of the jobs in the US has hovered somewhere between five and six-and-a-half percent. Despite all the efforts of women’s aviation bodies including the Ninety-Nines (the Whirly Girls’ “older sister” organisation) to make headway in rectifying the imbalance, women today constitute just 7% of the world’s certified pilots for all types of aircraft (‘Female Helicopter Pilots on The Rise’, Claire McCann, Prestige Helicopters, Inc., Upd.11-Nov-2020, www.prestigehelicopters.com).
Women in Aviation International: best strategy, targeting girls at a young age to foster the ‘bug’ for a flying careerThe reasons flying has continued to be a male stronghold are many and varied. With so few women pilots—only 13 credentialed to fly helicopters by 1955—young women and girls have been bereft of visible role models and mentors to show the way. At school-level not enough effort have been made to make teenage girls aware of the opportunities there are in a flying career. The preponderance of male pilots perpetuates the “highly masculine image of aviation“, reinforcing the stereotype that the profession is “not a woman’s job” (Why There Aren’t More Female Pilots’, Katherine LaGrave, IMdiversity 08-Mar-2018, www.imdiversity.com). This in part comes back to a prevailing mentality of “Top Gun” chauvinism. Female pilots have commented on aviation still being an “old boys’ club” and the lack of support, bias and intimidation they experienced from men in the industry during their training (‘Chances Are Your Pilot Isn’t a Woman. Here’s Why’, Kimberly Perkins, Seattle Business, (nd), www.seattlebusinessmag.com). The issue of unhelpful male pilots for some women has led to another road block, the paucity of female instructors in the industry.
Once in the industry some women pilots have found themselves facing static career paths, the sheer lack of opportunities to attain seniority has eventually led a number of women in military and commercial aviation to prematurely leave the profession. Another criticism of the aviation industry is that it hasn’t embraced the change in work rules and conditions that other industries have…getting the work/life balance right is an issue of more importance to women who usually have to bear the brunt of child-rearing activities (‘Why are there so few women in aviation?’, Kathryn Creedy, CNN, 20-Nov-2019, www.cnn.com).
Research suggests the prohibitive costs involved can be a barrier for women. Aircraft training in the US can cost up to US$150,000, add to this the soaring price of purchasing an entry-level commercial plane today…the (adjusted) price of buying a new Cessna 172 is four times greater than it was in 1960 (‘Why Are There So Few Female Pilots?, Rebecca Maksel, Air and Space, 06-Feb-2015, www.airspacemag.com).
What makes the persistence of multiple barriers and obstacles blocking women from realising their professional pilot dreams maddeningly vexatious is the dilemma now facing the industry as a whole, a looming worldwide shortage of qualified pilots to take the reins of the big airliners. Some airlines like United in the US recently have flagged the introduction of quotas to increase pilot numbers for women and for minorities, but much more fundamental structural change is required before we see real progress in tackling the gender imbalance.
(Photo: PPRuNe Forums)▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪
☸ having already been appointed a flugkapitän (flight captain), a position till then exclusively reserved for male German pilots
❇ later Reitsch was also the first woman to fly a rocket plane
✴ numbers in the US did initially rise from the 1960s to the 1980s but have plateaued since that point (Maksel)
🈂 member #1 was appropriately enough Hanna Reitsch
In Pursuit of Vertical Take-off and Autorotation Landing: From Rotorcraft to Autogyro to Practical Helicopter
🚁 Helicopter, from the Greek: helix (‘spiral’ or ‘whirl’ or ’convolution’) + pteron (‘wing’); into French: hélicoptère.
(Photo: Paul Popper/Popperfoto via Getty Images)
We know that manned, powered, heavier-than-air flight in an aircraft began with the Wright brothers in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina—unless that is you accept the audacious alternate candidate, Gustave Whitehead’s flight in Connecticut made two years earlier🅰—but when did the first helicopter get off the ground? The primitive archetype seems to be the brainchild of Frenchman Paul Cornu. Cornu, like the brothers Wright, started off as a bicycle maker before veering off into the nascent field of aerodynamic engineering.
M. Cornu (Photo: FAI)Getting the concept off the ground Near Lisieux in northern France in 1907, Monsieur Cornu became the first person to (ever so briefly) pilot an airborne rotary-wing, vertical-lift aircraft. The rotorcraft (using an unpowered rotor in free autorotation to develop lift) from Cornu’s own design was a twin-rotor job, the blades rotating in opposite directions which neutralised the torque. M. Cornu’s craft levitated about 1.5 metres off the ground, hovering for some 20 seconds. The Cornu ”Ur-copter” wasn’t manoeuvrable at all (requiring manpower to hold it in position from the ground) and therefore wasn’t practical, but it is considered to be a forerunner of the modern helicopter.
Juan De la Cierva (Photo: Crouch/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
De la Cierva and the autogyro
From 1912 on, numerous inventors and engineers were turning their hands to building prototypes of the rotorcraft, but with limited or ephemeral success. Compared to fixed-wing aircrafts, progress with rotorcrafts evolved very slowly, due to intrinsic problems with torque, dissymmetry of lift and control. Sikorsky (below) spent 30 years working on developing helicopters before his breakthrough. Etienne Oehmichen, whose early prototypes included vertically-mounted rotors and a tail rotor, allowing it to fly a distance of one kilometre in 1924! Oehmichen was also the first to carry passengers in his Oehmichen No. 2 helicopter. By the early 1920s Spanish aviator and engineer Juan De la Cierva built the autogyro (sometimes called a “windmill plane” or ‘gyroplane’)… his success advanced the understanding of rotor dynamics. Cierva’s autogiro had air safety in mind, proposing a solution to the craft losing its lift or stalling even at very low speeds. The Spaniard worked out that the autogyro’s rotor function is driven by the speed of the air, cf. the helicopter’s which depends on a motor…in the descent of the autogyro the rotor functioned as a kind of parachute according to Cierva. Ultimately, the helicopter’s superior velocity made it the preferable mode of aerocraft, however Cierva’s principle of the self-turning rotor remained a vital contribution to the later development of functional helicopters. Cierva’s flapping rotor blades has been described as “the single most important discovery in helicopter development” (CV Glines). A countryman of Cornu’s, Louis Bréguet, also experimented with the autogyro in the Thirties, his Bréguet-Dorand “Gyroplane Laboratoire” improving both the craft’s speed to 120km/h and its control capacity.
Another step forward in the evolution of helicopters came from Nazi Germany. Professor Heinrich Focke applied Cierva’s pioneering work on aerodynamics to the task of transitioning from the limitations of the autogyro to the creation of a “pure helicopter”. In 1936 Focke and Gerd Achgelis‘ Focke-Wulf Fw-61 smashed existing helicopter records for range and altitude and demonstrated autorotation descent to landing. This plus a control system much more reliable and robust than earlier rotorcrafts leads many aviation geeks to consider the Fw-61 to be “the world’s first truly functional helicopter”.
Image: http://primeindustriesusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/prime-industries-history-of-the-first-helicopter-infographic.jpg. ’History of the First Helicopter’.
Sikorsky’s practical copter What Cornu started, Russian-born American designer Igor Sikorsky brought to commercial fruition. Sikorsky invented the first mass-produced, and in the opinion of many, the first practical helicopter, the VS-300, in Stratford, Connecticut in 1939🅱. In commercial production called the R–4, it would go on to play a significant role in the Second World War. By the war’s end Sikorsky had added the R–5 and the R–6 models, specifically designed for the military and specialising in search-and-rescue missions. Although he didn’t invent the first prototype of the helicopter, Sikorsky is commonly thought of as “the father of helicopters” because “he invented the first successful helicopter upon which further designs were based”. The VS-300 became the model for all modern single-rotor helicopters.
Igor Sikorsky, 1939 test flight༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺
🅰 see the November 2014 blog on this site, ‘Wright or Not Right?: The Controversy over who really was “First in Flight”’
🅱 Sikorsky’s 1939 flight was actually tethered, so the first ‘free’ copter flight (also by Sikorsky) didn’t take place until the following year, 1940
☬ ☬ ☬ ☬ ☬
Sites and articles consulted:
‘History of Flight: Breakthroughs, Disasters and More’, Aaron Randle, Inside History, 09-Jul-2021, www.insidehistory.com
’Focke-Wulf Fw-61’, Modelling Madness, Brian R Baker, www.modellingmadness.com
‘World’s First Helicopter — Today in History: September 14’, September 14, 2018, Connecticut History.org, www.connecticuthistory.org
‘History of the Helicopter’, Mary Bellis, ThoughtCo, Upd. 04-Oct-2019, www.thoughtco.com
‘Who Invented the Helicopter? (and When?)’, Aerocorner, www.aerocorner.com
‘Juan de la Cierva: Autogiro Genius’, C.V. Glines, Aviation History, Sept 2012, www.au.readly.com
‘History of the Helicopter from Concept to Modern Day’, Prime Industries Inc, 31-Aug-2015, www.primeinustriesusa.com
’Juan de la Cierva and the Autogyro’s Invention’, Javier Yanes, Ventana al Conocimiento, 21-Sep-2015, www.bbvaopenmind.com
Building a Better Bike: The Evolution of the Modern “Safety Bicycle”
The absence of cars in cities during the coronavirus lockdown has been a boon to cyclists, both for the recreational kind and for commuter cyclists. There has been an “unprecedented surge in popularity” of bicycle traffic—even in the land of the automobile, the United States—with many bike shops since March reporting a doubling of their average sales…such is the demand now that bike manufacturers can’t build them fast enough [‘Cycling ‘explosion’: coronavirus fuels surge in US bike ridership’, (Miranda Bryant), The Guardian, 13-May-2020, www.theguardian.com ; ‘Australia is facing a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ as cycling booms, advocates say’, (David Mark), ABC News, 16-May-2020, www.abc.net.au ] 
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The renewed present enthusiasm to take up bike-riding in response to the pandemic recalls earlier periods of “bike-mania”in the West—late 1860s to mid-1870s and the 1890s—as the humble bike was evolving into its modern form. Credit for the basic look of the standard, no-frills bicycle as we we think of it today is generally given to John Kemp Starley for his 1885 invention, the “Rover Safety Bicycle”. The Rover’s similar-sized wheels, chain drive attached to the crankshaft and rear wheel, diagonal frame and relative lightness (20kg) retains the basic design of the modern bicycle [‘Pedal Your Way Through the Bicycle’s Bumpy History’, [Evan Andrews),
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The bike by various other names
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1890s, the world gone crazy for the bicycle
(Image:
Instrument of freedom and independence Health-wise physicians gave their approval. And ordinary folk suddenly were able to explore the countrysides, visit towns and places – far and near. Just about everyone, it seems, got into the act of riding bicycles – royalty and rulers in places like Russia, Zanzibar and Afghanistan took up cycling; First-wave feminists – Susan B Anthony declared that “bicycling emancipated women more than anything else”; women were especially enthusiastic as the activity allowed them to escape their voluminous and cumbersome Victorian skirts for more practical attire such as bloomers. When the lighter, less unwieldy safety bicycles came along, police in the UK were quick to adopt them in their work. Likewise, the NYC police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt mounted the city police on bikes to apprehend the new “public danger” of ‘scorchers’ (“speed demon” cyclists ) (Smith).
The conventional explanation for the demise of the bicycle boom is the rise of the commercially-viable automobile, but other factors may have contributed to the bicycle’s decline, such as the rapid growth of the early mass transit systems such as streetcars and trams which were a more practical alternative to bikes, especially in bad weather (Britannica).
(Source: Aspetar Sports Medicine Journal)
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The ‘Monopoly Myth’, a Review of The Monopolists
Monopoly: (n.) a market situation where one producer (or group of producers acting in unison) controls supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted; “exclusive possession” of the commodity is customarily implicit in the term [www.businesssdictionary.com; www.en.oxforddictionaries.com]
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As a kid my favourite board game wasn’t Monopoly, it was an old Milton Bradley game called Pirate and Traveler✱, however I certainly did play Monopoly an awful lot of times growing up (and it seemed like every game went for an interminably long amount of time!). So, having clocked up that amount of wasted Monopoly game-time, I was more than mildly interested to revisit my youth via a recent book on the universal and ubiquitous board game, and even more intrigued that its author, Mary Pilon, presents a radically different take on the genesis and development of Monopoly to what hitherto was been the received orthodoxy.
f=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/image-60.jpg”> (US Patent & Trademark Office)[/capt
Ralph Anspach comes into the story in 1973, six years after Darrow—made a multi-millionaire by the runaway success of Monopoly—had died. Anspach is an avowed anti-monopolist, by conviction a “trust-buster” who is mightily annoyed at the OPEC oil cartel’s stranglehold over that essential world commodity at the time (the 1973 Oil Crisis). He pursues his ideals by creating an Anti-Monopoly game in opposition to Parker Brothers’ über celebrated game. Parker Brothers sues Anspach for breach of copyright and so begins nearly ten years of legal battles with Parker Bros (in fact by this time the company was controlled by the General Mills corporation)…Anspach’s tireless research for the case leads him to the true, albeit convoluted, origins of Monopoly☸.
The Monopolists recounts Anspach’s monumental efforts and endlessly time-draining “detective work” in minute detail. Anspach traces the game back to one Elizabeth (Lizzie) Magie (long pre-dating Darrow), and here’s where the story gets really interesting! Magie, an independent-thinking, politically progressive Midwestern woman, was a staunch supporter of Henry George. George was the author of Progress and Poverty, a widely influential text which fuelled the introduction of the Progressive Era in the US (1890s-1920s). George advocated the introduction of a Single Tax on land and property (AKA Land Value Tax). Ms Magie invented and patented a board game in 1903-1904☯, called the Landlord’s Game, based on Georgist principles of wealth redistribution. Magie’s game was in her words, “a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all the usual consequences” [Single Tax Review, 1902], the Landlord’s Game was intended to educate Americans about the dangers of unbridled capitalism (ie, ultimately resulting in the monopolisation of business, benefitting only one player)⌑.
When I played Monopoly in the 1960s the takeaway message for me always aligned with the “Gordon Gecko/Greed is Good” world view…gold standard instruction on how to win at capitalism! Pilon points out the fundamental irony of Magie’s “thought-child” – once Parker Bros got their hands on Monopoly, the company left not a single stone unturned in the pursuit of eliminating any rival claims to “their game”⊡. Monopoly, under the aegis of Parker Bros, a game with the sole raison d’être of annihilating all business competitors, leaving a solitary victor, was the complete opposite of what the game’s prototype inventor intended it to be! Moreover, to further underscore the irony, the game became controlled by a company (Parker Bros) that “fought tooth and nail to maintain its own monopoly over it”.
Back to Ralph Anspach’s anti-monopoly crusade – as well as introducing or reintroducing Lizzie Magie to the world, the economics professor’s years of searching, digging in archives, interviewing people of interest across the United States, word-of-mouth, friend-of-a-friend, sometimes down blind alleys, etc, revealed that the games (or games) of Monopoly had been played in various forms and under various names for decades before Charles Darrow’s Pennsylvanian neighbours introduced him to the game. Pilon ties together all the threads of Monopoly’s antecedents – as unearthed by the indefatigably never-say-die Ralph Anspach. What came to light was that Magie’s game, either in its original published form (‘The Landlord’s Game’) or in derivative ‘backyard’ versions, had been played (prior to the publication of Darrow’s Monopoly) as follows:
⌲ among members of the early 20th century rural community of Arden (Delaware), an “alternative lifestyle” arts and crafts colony of “Single Taxers” (including the influential writer Upton Sinclair and the radical economist Scott Nearing who spread the word about Magie’s game to other locations)
⌲ among members of the Quaker community residing in Atlantic City in the 1920s (many Quaker families held “Monopoly nights”)
⌲ among left-wing university students and college “frat boys” on the Eastern Seaboard
⌲ among couples and families in urban Philadelphia (including those neighbours who first taught the game to Charles Darrow)
Unbeknownst to Lizzie Magie, many versions of her ‘Landlord’s Game’ had sprung up in the North-East of the country, often these early, widely dispersed players made their own homemade versions of Monopoly using hand-painted oil cloths, local street names and substitute tokens. In addition George Layton created and sold his own commercial version (which he called ‘Finance’) in the early 1930s. By the thirties a version of the game had spread to Texas – Rudy Copeland’s published board game of ‘Inflation’.
Parker Brothers’ whole claim on Monopoly was based on the contention that the game had no precedents to its 1935 patent with Darrow. Anspach’s pains-taking spade work proved that the game in various guises and forms existed “in the Public Domain” years and years before the Parkers and Darrow came on the scene!
Pilon injects many diverse strands in the narrative, even Abraham Lincoln makes a brief (oblique) appearance in The Monopolists – in the late 1850s Lizzie’s father James Magie, a newspaper editor and abolitionist, was an instrumental part of Lincoln’s political campaigns for office…this digression has a very tenuous connexion with Monopoly! The various currents traversed by the author takes the story beyond the purview of being a straightforward account of plagiarised copyrights and game inventions. The book illuminates the position of women in late 19th/early 20th century American society by positing what made Magie stand out from others of her sex at the time and what she was able to achieve – taking on a number of vocations and pursuits, retaining her autonomy and avoiding the “marriage trap”, becoming an inventor (in addition to the Landlord’s Game she held patents for inventions in the realm of stenography as well).
The three Parker Brothers ➚
Another strand follows the career of George S Parker, the founder of the eponymous games empire. Parker published his first board game (‘Banking’) at 17, and from the get-go was determined to establish a monopoly, systematically building up a catalog by buying up other manufacturers’ games (leading him headlong into an ongoing rivalry with fellow games giant Milton Bradley). In Parker’s zeal to totally tie down the company’s ownership and control of Monopoly, the company even went round buying up old (Pre-Parker) Monopoly sets. Eventually George Parker talked Lizzie Magie (by this time now Elizabeth Magie Phillips) into parting with her patent for the Landlord’s Game, and paying her a pittance for it with no residuals (despite inventing the archetypical business game Magie lacked business acumen and naively trusted Parker’s intentions to do the right thing by her and her invention, which he didn’t!)
The author takes the reader on another diversion, straying away from the origin controversy to surprisingly explore Monopoly’s role in World War II! The US Military purchased Monopoly sets to be sent to POWs detained in German prisons (and elsewhere in Europe). The intent behind this practice had a dual purpose: to boost morale for the imprisoned soldiers, but also a practical one –
Coda: The after-affects of Ralph Anspach’s 1983 victory over Parker Brothers in the US Supreme Court (including the ruling that the word monopoly was in fact generic) hasn’t brought any sense of closure to supporters of Elizabeth Magie Phillips. The public acknowledgement warranted her as the true and original inventor of Monopoly has not been forthcoming. Pilon points out that in the 1980s Parker Bros “quietly began to massage its Monopoly history”…a 1988 history of the company by a former Parker Bros R & D head admits that Darrow was not the game’s inventor, but neglects to mention Lizzie Magie. Similarly, on the official Monopoly website in the Nineties, Hasbro, Inc, which purchased Parker Brothers in 1991, starts the Monopoly story at 1933 with Darrow and scantly acknowledges the influence of the Landlord’s Game (again without mentioning Lizzie by name!) No plaque for Lizzie’s prototype of the Monopoly game exists anywhere (although there is one in Atlantic City recognising the contribution of that city’s Quaker players to the invention of the game!)
FN: Mary Pilon’s research for The Monopolists is nothing if not thorough. In the end-piece she includes a long, long list of acknowledgements of her sources, helpers and supporters, she even gives a hearty shout-out to coffee shops in seven different cities (I said she was thorough!)…one very notable exception missing from the author’s acknowledgement of research help is Hasbro! Hasbro denied Pilon’s request to access the Parker Brothers’ archives and outright refused to answer any of the many fact-checking queries she submitted to the world’s largest toy and games company. Zero marks to Hasbro for the cause of corporate transparency…ummm, given how much she gleaned from other sources, I wonder what else they didn’t want her to discover?
The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, by Mary Pilon [Bloomsbury New York: 2016 p/b ed.]
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✱ Pirate and Traveler with some modifications and an updated, aviation emphasis eventually morphed into a similar game called Pan American which I played with equal relish. The idea of these two games was to spin a number or roll a dice, collect a destination card and progress from one city to another city somewhere in the world. When you completed a requisite number of destinations, you hightailed it back to a home base city (Godthab, Greenland), first one there was the winner! The games educated me on political geography and I learnt the distance (in miles in those days) between different places on the world map ⊚ with Atlantic City street names on the earliest editions of the Monopoly sets (later editions of the game utilised New York City streets and London streets on their boards) ✥ a comparison of the visuals of Magie’s original 1904 patented game and Darrow’s 1935 patented Monopoly reveals profound continuities…Darrow’s replicates essential features of Magie’s – a square board, a space “for the emblematic GO TO JAIL”, a “Public Park” space (anticipating the Parkers’ “Free Parking”), ‘chance’ cards, the use of tokens representing money, deeds and properties ☸ Parker Bros, when taking on Darrow’s game, accepted and promoted the myth that Darrow had fed them, ie, HE invented the game from his own head in the early 1930s, and that there were NO precedents for it ☯ by a remarkable happenstance of history Lizzie filed her patent claim on the same day in 1903 as the infinitely more famous Wright brothers filed their “flying machine” patent ⌑ interestingly Magie devised two versions of the Landlord’s Game – version 1, the objective was to crush all of your opponents (= the contemporary game of Monopoly produced by Parker Bros), and version 2 – the objective was to create wealth for all to share ⊡ the three Parker brothers (especially George) were evangelically zealous about this because, as the author explains, the company had been “badly burnt” twice before with two products that they had thought that they held exclusive control and ownership of – ‘Tiddlywinks’ and ‘Ping Pong’
Equality at 10,000 Feet: The Pioneer Aviatrix in the Golden Age of Aviation – Part I
❝ We had to prove that women were as good pilots… in an age where some men didn’t think a woman should drive a horse and buggy, much less drive an automobile, it was a job to prove that females could fly.❞ ~ Louise Thaden[1]
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The other afternoon the resident afternoon ABC evangelist on the wireless was rabbiting on that the PC word to describe female pilots, especially those early pilots of the airways, was aviator … he was saying that the term aviatrix was de rigueur, we should use only the ‘correct’ gender-neutral term ‘aviator’ which doesn’t make a distinction between the two sexes, etc, etc.
And in a purely technical sense the government-sanctioned radio evangelist is right, the name ‘aviator’ does better represent the spirit of our contemporary times, after all no one (hardly anyone, right?) these days uses poetess or even authoress – these descriptors sound a bit cumbersome and more than slightly ridiculous in 2017 … although I note that the staunchly conservative Oscar ‘cinemarati’ dole out prizes to screen actors every March for what they still insist on calling the “best actress” and “best supporting actress”. Notwithstanding all this, my preference to describe those pioneering women of the skies is for ‘aviatrix’, quaintly old-fashioned as the term may be … to me it does set them apart, identifying the uniqueness of their important role in the evolution of aviation history and as pathfinders for new female work roles, and in doing so, demonstrating that women were capable of doing anything than men could do.
The internet is awash with studies and information on untold number of pioneer aviatrices. A casual googling of “aviatrix history” will turn up a host of sites with titles like “Harriet Quimbey – First U.S. Aviatrix”, “Lores Bonney – the forgotten aviatrix”, “The History Chicks Aviatrix Archives”, “LadiesLoveTailDraggers | Aviatrix History”; “Aviatrix – Sheroes of History”, “BBC – Forgotten record of aviatrix Beryl Markham”, “Aviatrix You Should Know: China’s Amelia Earhart” and “Our History | Women in Aviation History | “Sharpie: The Life Story of Evelyn Sharpie – Nebraska’s Aviatrix”. Clearly, most who write on the subject, on the World Wide Webosphere anyway, seem to concur with my preference for ‘aviatrix’.
France gold, the US silver … What becomes readily apparent when you delve into the history of the early, formative phase of aviation, is how internationally diverse the phenomenon of the aviatrix was. France and the United States led the way with the earliest pioneering achievements❈ – first woman to earn a pilot’s licence (Frenchwoman Baroness Raymondé de Laroche, 1910); first woman to pilot a motorised aircraft solo (American Aida de Acosta in France, 1903, in a dirigible owned by Alberto Santos-Dumont – six months before the famous Wright Brothers’ flight). Not to be outdone, women aviatrices in the English-speaking world were also quick out of the blocks – Anglo-Irish aviatrix Lilian Bland in Belfast 1910/1911 was one of the first to design, build and fly her own aircraft (which she called the Mayfly⌖)[2].
In the first 40 years of the 20th century the appearance of women pilots became a worldwide craze. Aviatrices took to the air in Belgium, Germany, Britain and Eire, Russia, Estonia, Argentina, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt, Japan, China, Korea, Italy, Australasia, Canada, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and Persia, in fact from any country that had a viable even if rudimentary aircraft industry.
Aviatrix “rock stars” The public at large is familiar possibly only with a few of these pioneer aviatrices, the “glamour-pus” headline grabbers like American Amelia Earhart and England’s Amy Johnson, or if you are from the USA you probably have also heard of Ruth Law, Louise Thaden, Jacky Cochran and Florence ‘Pancho’ Barnes. All of these high-flyers (literally) broke numerous records and won continent-to-continent, long-distance air races¤ and have been the subject of various biographies, television documentaries or biopics.
[Photo: www.airforcebase.net]
Barnstorming There was a lot of women pilots by the twenties and thirties (especially in the USA), and the great majority of them weren’t as fortunate as Earhart and a select few of the elite aviatrices who could elicit sponsorship from newspapers and the like. There were few posts for commercial pilots available to women at the time (primarily due to systemic and deeply ingrained sexism), therefore many women pilots in the “Roaring Twenties” turned to barnstorming and if they could to working as a stunt pilot in the movies. Barnstormers moved around the country performing aerial tricks and manoeuvres, for audiences, either individually or in orchestrated clusters of Gipsy Moth type crafts (known as “flying circuses”). Barnstormers also made money by taking local townspeople up for joy rides[3].
“First-wave” Australasian aviatrices Gladys Sandford was the first New Zealand woman to be awarded an air pilot’s licence (1925), but without dispute the Shaky Isles’ greatest-ever aviatrix was Jean Gardner Batten. After wrecking her first biplane Batten talked the Castrol Oil Co into buying a second-hand De Havilland Gipsy Moth, in which she was the first woman to complete the solo round trip between England and New Zealand. Batten also won the Harmon Trophy three times and achieved a world record for flying from England to South America. Later in the thirties the relentless Kiwi aviatrix Batten obliterated Amy Johnson’s England to Australia record, bettering it by more than four days![4]
Australia’s first female flyer in an heavier-than-air plane was Florence Taylor in 1909 at Narrabeen, NSW. Taylor’s flight was in a glider designed by her husband George (which he had adapted from Lawrence Hargrave’s cellular box-kite prototype). Prejudice from male aviators and the industry meant that women in Australia were prevented from holding a commercial pilot’s licence until 1927 (Millicent Bryant was the first to earn her Australian licence in that year)✪.
Other women soon took up the mantle of the earliest Aussie aviatrices, most prominent among these were Maude ‘Lores’ Bonney and the aptly named Nancy-Bird Walton. Lores Bonney, originally from South Africa, in the 1930s was “regarded as perhaps Australia’s most competent aviatrix”[5]. Bonney’s record-breaking feats started in 1932 when she became the first aviatrix to circumnavigate the continent of Australia (embarking on the marathon flight – the equivalent of Darwin to London in distance – after first gaining the permission of her husband). She was the first pilot of either sex to fly from Brisbane to Cape Town, and the first woman to fly solo from Australia to England.
Nancy-Bird Walton got her pilot’s licence at 19 and like Bonney and so many other early aviators (from Charles Lindbergh down) tried initially to make a living out of it through barnstorming. In 1936 Walton won the Ladies Trophy in the Adelaide to Brisbane air race in a record time. As the first woman commercial pilot in Australia Walton was responsible for the operation of a flying medical service in the outback (Royal Far West Children’s Health Service), using her own Leopard Moth as an air ambulance. During WWII she trained a women’s air corps as back up for the men pilots in the RAAF and in 1950 founded the Australian Women Pilot’s Association, paving the way for today’s female commercial pilots to make a career of the profession[6].
Hollywood ’Aviatrix’ Kate Hepburn, feet and plane planted firmly on the ground!
PostScript: Hollywood and the glamorous socialite aviatrix In the golden age of aviation aviatrices like Jean Gardner Batten and Beryl Markham were not adverse to infusing a bit of glamour into their public personas. It certainly didn’t hinder their careers and sponsorship was often needed by the young female pilots to finance their attempts to win races and break records. In the twenties and thirties nothing personified the idea of the modern woman more than the aviatrix, she represented the height of glamour and daring … and of course the ubër glam-aviatrix in the world was Earhart whose image and media-savvy husband secured her income from promotional and speaking tours and from product endorsement [7].
It is hardly surprising then that from early on Hollywood took an interest in the aviatrix, and in the whole burgeoning area of aviation which provided film-makers with fresh new storylines with lots of breath-taking action and thrills. Several of the glamorous aviatrices had stints in movie acting. Ruth Elder for instance, (known as “Miss America of Aviation”) juggled flying with a (part-time) actress job and a (full-time) one as a serial ‘matrimonialist’ (Elder was married six times). RKO cashed in the vogue by casting an up-and-coming Katherine Hepburn as a socialite aviatrix in 1933’s Christopher Strong. Capitalising on the appeal of feminine good looks and the fearless reputation of women pilots, studio photographers cultivated the “glamorous aviatrix look” for movie publicity purposes[8].
——————————————————— ❈ the very first experiments with flight involving women began in France – 1784: first woman to fly in a hot-air balloon, Marie Élisabeth Thible (eight months after the Montgolfier brothers’ first successful accent); 1798: first woman to pilot an airship, Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse (Mme Labrosse was also the first woman to parachute jump from a balloon, 1799), www.centennialofwomenpilots.com. So, in a very real sense aviatrices were in on the ground (umm, off the ground) in aviation from the get-go! ⌖ as in may fly, may not ¤ Earhart and Johnson were both fated to die in mysterious circumstances, tragically if heroically in pursuit of their addiction to flying
✪ although the first Australian woman to get a flyer’s licence was nurse Hilda McMaugh (1919) who achieved it in the UK…she would have been barred from flying if she had returned to her homeland afterwards
[1] ‘Aviation Pioneer Louise Thaden’, www.arkansasairandmilitarymuseum.com [2] K Mitchell, ‘Lilian Bland: Ireland’s first female pilot, the world’s first aviation engineer’, Engineers Journal (Republic of Ireland), 31-May-2016, www.engineersjournal.ie [3] ‘Barnstorming’, Wikipedia, http://em.n.wikipedia.org [4] Ian Mackersey. ‘Batten, Jean Gardner’, from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/4b13/batten-jean-gardner (accessed 20 May 2017) [5] K Alexander, Taking Flight: Lores Bonney’s Extraordinary Flying Career, (2016) [6] ‘Nancy Bird Walton AO’, (Australian Museum), www.australianmuseum.net.au [7] K Lubben Amelia Earhart: Image and Icon, cited in ‘Why Amelia Bombed’ (V Postrel), 10-Nov-2009, www.vpostrel.com [8] S Kelly, Aviators in Early Hollywood (2008)]
Wright or Not Right?: The Controversy over who really was “First in Flight?”
“They are in fact either flyers or liars”
~ New York Herald (Paris edition), 1906
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To the vast majority of people, especially in America, the name Wright brothers and the first mechanically-propelled flight in a heavier-than-air craft have always been synonymous with each other. The reality is that the achievement of Orville and Wilbur’s “First Flight” has always been strongly contested from certain quarters within the aviation industry in the United States – and internationally as well.
Not long after the news spread about the momentous event at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903, the significance of what the Wrights’ had done found itself under challenge, especially as time went on from the European aviation community. French newspapers after 1903 described the celebrated American brothers as bluffeurs (bluffers). Doubts were raised about their achievements when the Wrights failed to release the photo of the Wright Flyer in flight at Kitty Hawk until nearly five years after the groundbreaking 1903 flight … newspapers acerbically asked: “Were they fliers or liars?”, Paris edition of the New York Herald (10 Feb 1906); ‘Wright Brothers: European skepticism’, www.spiritus-temporis.com.
The state of North Carolina has harboured no such doubts, proudly displaying the slogan First in Flight on its car number-plates. Whether you accept the Wrights’ claim to be first in flight, or some other contender (of which there are several), in a sense could depend on what is meant by manned, aeronautical flight. Orville Wright’s first successful if brief powered flight was by no measure the first human flight in history. The genesis of intentional manned air travel can be traced back to the late 18th century with the advent of large hot air balloons (starting with the Montgolfier brothers of France in 1783).
As well, in the 30 years preceding Kitty Hawk, there was a host of aviation pioneers experimenting with monoplanes, biplanes, box-kites and gliders including, 1874: Félix du Temple; 1894: Hiram Maxim; 1894: Lawrence Hargrave; 1898: Augustus Moore Herring [B Kampmark, ‘Wright Brothers: Right or Wrong?’, Montréal Review (April 2013]. These flights however were either pre-power ones, or if motorised, they have been largely discredited as having been either unsustained, uncontrolled or as at the least not sufficiently controlled [P Scott, The Shoulders of Giants: A History of Human Flight to 1919].
The achievements of Orville and Wilbur in their 1903 Wright Flyer moved beyond the brothers’ earlier experiments in motorless gilders, but there are at least two other rival claimants prior to December 1903 whose aeronautical experiments were also mechanically-driven and became airborne albeit briefly – Gustave Whitehead in 1901 and Richard Pearse in 1902/1903. The late 1890s and early 1900s were awash with would-be plane makers, there was a veritable aircraft mania world-wide with people all the way from Austria to Australasia trying to construct workable “flying machines”.
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Richard Pearse ⇓
Pearse’s somewhat erratic aircraft experiments in New Zealand, far away from the salient aeronautical developments in the US Eastern Seaboard and Europe, largely flew under the radar (to invoke an obvious pun!). The evidence suggests that Canterbury farmer Pearse’s home-built glider (equipped with tricycle wheels and an air-compressed engine) made at least one (but probably more) flights, but with little control over the craft. What was to Pearse’s credit was that unlike the Wright Flyer which managed only to travel in a straight line on 17 December 1903, the New Zealander was able to turn right and left during his flight on 11 May 1903 [PS Ward, ‘Richard Pearse, First Flyer’ The Global Life of New Zealanders, www.nzedge.com].
Pearse’s low-key approach to his attempts meant that no photographs were taken, although Geoffrey Rodcliffe identifies over 40 witnesses to Pearce’s flights prior to July 1903 [http://avstop.com]. Pearse did not actively promote his own claims for a place in aviation history (unlike the consistently determined and even pathological efforts of the Wright brothers to consolidate their reputation), and he himself conceded that the Wrights’ flight achieved a “sustained and controlled” trajectory, something that he had not. But Pearse did contribute to aviation’s development nonetheless through the creation of a monoplane configuration, wing flaps and rear elevator, tricycle undercarriage with steerable nosewheel, and a propeller with variable-pitch blades driven by a unique double-acting horizontally opposed petrol engine [G Ogilvie, ‘Pearse, Richard William’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (Te Ara) 7 Jan 2014].
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Gustav Whitehead ⇓
G A Whitehead was a German migrant (born Gustave Weisskopf) living in Connecticut who started experimenting with gliders (variations on the glider prototype design developed by aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal) in the mid-1890s, at a time when Wilbur and Orville were still making and repairing bicycles in Dayton, Ohio. The case in support of the flight made by Whitehead on 14 August 1901 in what must be noted was an improbable-looking, bat-shaped, engine-propelled glider at Fairfield near Bridgeport, was first taken up in 1935 (in an article in an industry magazine, Popular Aviation, entitled ‘Did Whitehead Precede Wright In World’s First Powered Flight?’)回. Whitehead’s claim lay dormant until the 1960s when army reservist William O’Dwyer, took up the German-American engine-maker’s cause and did his upmost to promote his “flying machine”.
A surprise rival to the Wrights’ crown
Supporters of Whitehead recently received a further boost through the research of Australian aviation historian John Brown who discovered a photo (lost since the 1906 Aero Club of America Exhibition) purporting to be of Whitehead’s № 21 Gilder in flight. Largely on the basis of this, Brown was able to convince the premier aviation journal, Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, to recognise Whitehead’s claim over that of the Wrights’ as the first powered and navigable flight in history [“An airtight case for Whitehead?”, www.fairfield-sun.com, 24 August 2013]. Doubts remain however about the Whitehead thesis. Brown’s reliance on the newly-discovered photo remains problematic, the image even ultra-magnified is indistinct and inconclusive of anything much. In any case the providence is questionable, there is no irrefutable evidence yet unearthed linking it to Whitehead’s 1901 flight. [“The case for Gustave Whitehead”, www.wright-brothers.org]
⇑ Whitehead & his № 21 Glider
Footnote: The newly-acquired kudos of Connecticut arising from Jane’s recognition of Whitehead, has led to the amusing suggestion from some Connecticuters, that the state’s number-plates now be inscribed (at the risk of some serious grammatical mangling), Firster in Flight“, as a counterfoil to North Carolina’s “First in Flight”❈.
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Santos-Dumont’s biplane ⇓
Santos, breaking through for Europe (and Brazil) A case has also been made for Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian aviator-inventor as the first to fly a mechanised aircraft – the 1906 Paris flight of his 14-bis biplane (Condor # 20). Supporters of the Brazilian aviator argue this on the grounds that it, not the Wrights 1903 flight, represented the first officially witnessed, unaided take-off and flight by a heavier-than-air craft. Brazilians, whilst acknowledging that the Wright Brothers conducted a successful flight earlier, argue that Santos-Dumont should be given pre-eminence because the 14-bis‘ take-off was made from fixed wheels (as was Pearse’s flight in NZ incidentally) rather than catapulted into the air from skids as happened with the Wright Flyer in 1903 [‘The case for Santos-Dumont’, www.wright-brothers.org]. The patriotic Brazilians, always ready to embrace a national hero, sporting or otherwise, have gone to great and amusing lengths to register their pride in Santos-Dumont’s achievement. Many Brazilian cities have an Avenida Santos Dumont named in honour of the aviator. In a characteristically Brazilian vein of jocularity, some Brazilians have taken a “stretch-limo” approach, rendering the street name into English thus: Santos Dumont the True Inventor of the Airplane and Not the Wright Brothers Avenue [V Barbara, ‘Learning to Speak Brazinglish’, New York Times, 8 November 2013].
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Hargrave at Stanwell Tops ⇓ 
Illawarra’s place in the pioneering story of manned flight: Hargrave started off constructing ornithopters (“mechanical birds’ utilising a ‘flapping’ method) before experimenting with designs based on kites. Hargrave’s cellular or box kites provided the basis for a rigid, stable aeroplane. In 1894 at Stanwell Park in the Illawarra region, south of Sydney, Hargrave tested his own four-kite device which got the inventor airborne for a distance of five metres, the world’s first ”flying contraption” to achieve aerial lift from a fixed-wing [‘Aviation in Australia Hargrave’s flying machines’, State Library of NSW, www.sl.nsw.gov.au].
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Jane’s magazine’s decision in 2013 to jettison the Wrights’ primacy and endorse Whitehead’s claim to be the first powered flight is in marked contrast to the position of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum on the subject. The key to understanding the Smithsonian’s rigid, on-going refusal to countenance the Whitehead case, or even to have an open mind on it (the Smithsonian dismissively refers to it as the “Whitehead Myth”), has its roots in the testy relationship that prevailed between the Wrights and the Institution. From the start the Smithsonian did not immediately and unconditionally embrace the Wright brothers’ Kitty Hawk achievement. Instead, the Institute sought to elevate Samuel Pierpoint Langley‘s unsuccessful Aerodrome craft on an equal footing with the Wright Flyer (at one point Langley was Secretary of the Smithsonian – a clear suggestion of a conflict of interest within the Institution). In retaliation the Wrights refused to display their 1903 “First Flight” aircraft in the Smithsonian. Orville, after Wilbur’s early death, eventually shipped it off to England where it was exhibited in the Science Museum in South London instead [‘History of the 1903 Wright Flyer’, (Wright State University Libraries), www.libraries.wright.edu].
The intriguing twist in this story occurred in 1942 when the remaining Wright, Orville, relented on the Smithsonian ban, but only after a deal was struck. The Smithsonian recanted its long-standing statement that Langley’s Aerodrome was the first machine capable of flight in favour of the Wrights’ claim. In return the Washington DC Institution was allowed to hold and exhibit the 1903 Wright Flyer. The rider which contractually committed the Smithsonian stated that if the Institute ever deviated from its acknowledgement that the Flyer was the first craft to make a controlled, sustained powered flight, then control of the Flyer would fall into the hands of Orville’s heirs.
On display at the Smithsonian (National Air & Space Museum) ⇓
Critics of the Institute believe that the Smithsonian’s indebtedness to the Wrights’ legacy (the fear of losing the historic Flyer to the estate executors) prevents it from recognising the merits of Whitehead’s pioneering achievement irrespective of the weight of evidence put forward [J Liotta, ‘Wright Brothers Flight Legacy Hits New Turbulence’, www.news.nationalgeographic.com]. Clearly this is a powerful disincentive to the Smithsonian objectively assessing the merits and new evidence for any rival claims to the Wrights (not just Whitehead’s) which may be unearthed.
The Wright stuff There were numerous aviation pioneers, engineers and technologists experimenting with new forms of aircraft at the turn of the 20th century, so what was it that made the Wright brothers stand out from the others? The preservation of identifiable photographic evidence and documentation of the December 1903 attempts certainly contributed to the strengthening of the brothers’ argument for being “First”. Another factor is that the brothers scrupulously consolidated and cultivated their reputation as the foremost air pioneers. Clearly the Wrights had an eye on history which contrasts with the less calculated approach of their rivals (especially Whitehead and Pearse). The Wrights vigorously defended the accomplishments of their Flyer against that of competing airships. They also went to great efforts to protect their technologies against intellectual theft … the propensity of the Wrights to resort to lawsuits when they felt their interests (eg, patent preservation) was threatened, pays testimony to this.
The Wrights, unlike most of the competition, kept on improving the quality and capability of their airplanes (at least up until they got bogged down in patent litigation), eg, the development of “wing warping” helped control the aircraft through enhanced aerodynamic balance. [D Schneider, ‘First in Flight?’, American Scientist, 91(6), Nov-Dec 2003]. The patents issue and the brothers’ preparedness to play “hardball” with their rivals led them into questionable ethical terrain, eg, their refusal to acknowledge the influence on their designs of pioneers who came before them, such as the Anglo-Australian Hargrave [‘The Pioneers’ op.cit.].
Kill Devil Hills (Nth Carolina) (Image: www.visitob.com)
The credence given to the Wright brothers’ claim to be the first successful flyers should perhaps come with an asterisk, signifying it as heavily qualified, as in David Schneider’s all-inclusive, tongue-in-cheek description: “First in Sustained, Piloted, Controlled, Powered, Heavier-than-air Flight of Lasting Technological Significance” [ibid].
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Many in the public at large would hold with tradition and still attribute the crucial breakthrough in aerial navigation to the Wright brothers…but can we really say that in that start-up era of aeronautics that any one of the countless attempts by aviation pioneers was absolutely the definitive one? The differences between what Whitehead, Santos-Dumont, Pearse, the brothers Wright and Herring achieved with their best efforts seems to be one of degree, not kind.
Augustus Moore Herring, the darling of Michigan aviation enthusiasts, managed a flight of only 73 feet and no more than 10 seconds in duration, no more than an extended hop according to National Air and Space Museum curator, Tom Crouch, but it registered as a lift-off nonetheless [TD Crouch, A Dream of Wings]. “Bamboo Dick” Pearse’s optimal flight in Temuka, NZ, travelled a mere 50 feet or so and abruptly ended 15 feet up in a gorse-hedge! The last and best attempt of Orville in the Wright Flyer on that December day in 1903 lasted 59 seconds and travelled some 852 feet in distance. Gus Whitehead’s best try on 14 August 1901 was half a mile according to him, but it was poorly documented, lacked verification and any pellucid images of the feat.
Did any of the documented early flights per se achieve “sustained and controlled flight”? Human conquest of the sky didn’t happen in one quantum leap, surely it came about in a series of small, measured steps, each building on the one before. It is more meaningful to see the development of viable flying machines as something that happened incrementally, an aerodynamic puzzle put together piece-by-piece. It was an international effort, the culmination of the accumulated efforts of gifted pioneering aeronautical designers such as George Cayley, Octave Chanute, Samuel Langley, Lawrence Hargrave and Otto Lilienthal whose experiments made it possible for the Wrights and others to experiment with flight, coming closer and closer to the realisation of successful manned, powered flight.
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PostScript: Pittsburg 1899 In a documentary shown on national ABC television (Australia) John Brown made the case for an even earlier attempt at powered flight by Gus Whitehead, which occurred in the city of Pittsburg in 1899. Brown does not contend that this flight by the German-American should be recognised as the first successful attempt because it was not controlled – to the point that the aircraft actually crash-landed into a brick building, Who Flew First: Challenging the Wright Brothers, (DTV 21, ABC 2016).
——-——————-—————————– 回 freelance writer Stella Randolph was responsible for maintaining interest in Whitehead’s aviation pursuits, researching and writing The Lost Flights of Gustave Whitehead in the 1930s ❈ then there’s the claims of Ohio and specifically Dayton to their part in aviation history, the Wright Flyer being manufactured in Dayton
◖◗ See also the related article on this blogsite (October 2016) – “The Wright Way, the Only Way: the Aviation ‘Patent Wars’ and Glenn Curtiss”