By CHARLES WALSH cwalsh@ctpost.com - 12/14/2002
Wright Brothers, Schmight Brothers. Our guy Whitehead got up there first and we can prove it. That may be an bit of an exaggeration of how a close-knit group of area people feel about the upcoming 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first powered flight, but not by much.
Rather, these folks hold that it was German immigrant Gustave Whitehead of Bridgeport, who made the first powered flight.
They believe the machinist and inventor flew his plane on Aug. 14, 1901, on a hill somewhere in Fairfield, almost two years before the Wrights catapulted their airship aloft at Kitty Hawk, N.C., on Dec. 17, 2003.On Wednesday, the nation will mark the 100th anniversary of that first Wright Brothers flight.
One name not likely to be mentioned during the many events and ceremonies surrounding the anniversary is Gustave Whitehead.
Right now, about the only respect Whitehead gets outside of Bridgeport and vicinity is a grudging acknowledgment that he was an early aeronautical pioneer. A photo of Whitehead on exhibit in the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., bears a caption that states he "never flew."
"We're really not anti-Wright Brothers," says Andy Kosch of Fairfield, who, more than any other person, spearheaded the battle to recognize Whitehead's achievement. "What they did was great, but what Whitehead and others did was also great and they should get some credit."
Bridgeport City Historian Mary Witkowski echoed that sentiment. "Whitehead flew before the Wrights," she said. "So did others. I don't understand why they can't acknowledge that."
In the early 1980s, Kosch, a science teacher at Platt Regional Vocational-Technical School in Milford, assembled a few friends who were willing to devote weekends to building a nearly exact replica of Model #21, the bird-like craft in which Whitehead supposedly made his pre-Wrightian flight in 1901.
On Dec. 29, 1986, Kosch made 20 short but successful flights in the replica. Zooming just 6 feet off the ground, the craft flew for a distance of 330 feet. Just as Whitehead reportedly did, Kosch flew standing up, changing the plane's direction by shifting his weight in an open cockpit.
Sadly, the flight ended in near disaster when an intrepid Bridgeport Post photographer was hit by one of the wheels.
"The photographer was seriously injured, but recovered," Kosch said. However, the plane succumbed to legal problems that have kept it grounded ever since.
Now, however, a new effort to build a flyable replica of the Whitehead craft is under way.
Under Kosch's direction, students in the carpentry and machine shop classes at Platt Tech are working on a new replica of Whitehead's Model #21 aircraft and the steam-powered motor that powered it.
"With luck," Kosch said, "we could have the project finished within a year, possibly less." When it is, Kosch expects to be at the controls again.
The Whitehead plane, which resembles a cross between a pre-historic bird and a Chinese lantern, will be made from some of the same materials Whitehead used. The wings will be constructed from long, flexible bamboo sticks webbed together with either silk or rayon. The fuselage will have a frame of spruce covered with canvas.
The engine building project is based on a Whitehead design that used rifle barrels discarded by Remington Arms in Bridgeport as piston rods. Donald Richardson, a retired Sikorsky Aircraft engineer is consulting with Platt students and machine tool teachers on the engine project. Instead of the chemically produced steam that ran Whitehead's original engine, the Platt replica will be powered by compressed air.
Kosch's 1986 replica was powered by two standard ultra-light aircraft motors. Later tests showed the motors developed 10.5 horsepower, almost identical to the power of Whitehead's original.
An eyewitness account of Whitehead's original flight appeared in The Bridgeport Sunday Herald four days after it occurred. Whitehead believers often cite the article as proof the flight happened.
The story identified the location of the early-morning flight only as "back of Fairfield, along the highway, where there is a large field and few trees to avoid in flying the air ship." Most experts believe that location was Fairfield's Tunxis Hill area, near Knapp's Highway. Years later, Whitehead purchased a house a short distance from there.
Later, aeronautical historians charged that the writer had exaggerated some of his descriptions of the flight. Some even said the writer's account was a total fantasy based on Whitehead's hopes for the plane.
In the 1930s more than 30 people signed affidavits saying they witnessed Whitehead's flights before 1903.
Photographs of Whitehead's planes are plentiful, although none show a plane in the air. The Herald had a sketch to document the flight.
"We know they [in-flight photos] exist," said another Whitehead supporter, Kaye Williams, who operates Captain's Cove in Bridgeport. "One day someone will just walk in here and hand them over."
Kosch is confident that someday evidence will come to light proving Whitehead was indeed the first man to fly. Unfortunately, Whitehead's family, who lived in the Tunxis Hill area of Fairfield, supposedly donated many of his engines to wartime scrap metal drives. Later they sent boxes and boxes of Whitehead's records to the dump.
Gustave Weisskopf (Whitehead's German name) was born in Leutershausen, Bavaria. Obsessed with flying from an early age, once he arrived in this country he built many gliders, engines and airplanes in his spare time as he worked as a machinist at such companies as Bullard Tool and the Locomobile automobile plant.
As the center of the machine tool industry at the turn-of-the-century, Bridgeport was the perfect place for building experimental aircraft.
"History by Contract," a 1976 book by William O'Dwyer, a former Fairfield resident who believes Whitehead was the first man to fly, exposed the root of the Smithsonian's dogged refusal to even consider the Whitehead claims.
He said that the executors of Orville Wright's will would allow Smithsonian officials to display the Wright brothers' plane only if they signed a document. He said that document stipulated the museum would never "publish or permit to be displayed a statement or label in connection with, or in respect of, any aircraft, model or design of earlier date than the Wright airplane of 1903, claiming in effect that such aircraft was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight."
Any violation of the contract results in the Smithsonian losing the plane, O'Dwyer said.
When "60 Minutes" did a segment on the Bridgeport group's claims that Whitehead flew first, the late Harry Reasoner interviewed a Smithsonian historian who steadfastly rejected the possibility that Whitehead had flown before the Wrights. Reasoner made no attempt to ask the man about the restrictive contract.
At a talk Kosch gave last week at the Stratford Library, someone in the audience wanted to know why, when the Wrights were claiming to be the first to make a powered flight, Whitehead did not speak up to dispute the claim.
"Because he was not the type of man to do that kind of thing," Kosch said. Richardson added that it is possible because his flight was not a 100 percent success, Whitehead considered it a failure. "That's how scientists were back then," he said.
Kosch hopes that when the latest replica of Whitehead's plane is completed and flies, it will add more weight to case for Whitehead being the first to fly.
Asked what he thinks might cause the Smithsonian to reconsider its position on Whitehead, Kosch thought for a moment and said: "Well, maybe if we find the pope was there "