Growing up, my mother told us stories of my Great-Great Uncle Gustave, a figure who has remained throughout my life, darkly romantic - an inventor who spent his life dedicated to dreams and died penniless as a result. As a kid, I was fascinated with Stella Randolph's pioneering book The Lost Flights of Gustave Whitehead. At our family reunion when I was eleven, I pined to win the photograph of Gustave with his airplane Number 21 that was being raffled off to pay for the hall-rental. In Grade 10 I wrote a paper for a social studies class and received a failing grade owing to the lack of historical sources I could cite. And of course this website, started back in 1997 as a University project - and then left on its own for all these years. I recently came back to it realizing that either it had to come down or needed revamping.
Coming back to the site to make the decision, I realized that I am no less fascinated by Gustave Whitehead now than I was as a kid - and both his story and the incredible beauty of his inventions still tug at my emotional strings.
Although there are many sites, articles and even a museum dedicated to the work of this pioneer - I find it impossible to discard this lifelong interest and so am working to create a portal into information and resources of all kinds. Please contribute if you have something to be shared via this site - particularly photographs or other visual materials.
Thanks to all the supporters we have had over the years - and particularly deepsky.com who hosted this site from 1997-2006 without any complaint.
Megan Adam, June 2006
(Note on the name Weisskopf/Whitehead: Like many immigrant families, the Weisskopfs who entered the United States and Canada in the late 1800s changed their names to a more "English" version - Whitehead - which they used exclusively afterwards. Throughout this site, you will see the use of both the German and the Anglicized name - as a result of different source materials. The family name is always recognized now as Whitehead.