Available in Française, Español, Português, Deutsch, Россию, 中文, 日本, and others. f all the people who claim to have flown before the Wright brothers, perhaps the most controversial is Gustave Whitehead. The controversy first arose in 1935 with the publication of a magazine article on Whitehead's aeronautical ambitions, and it continues to flare from time to time. According to believers in the Whitehead legend, the first powered flight occurred on August 14, 1901. The Legend Begins Whitehead, or Weisskopf in his native language, was a German immigrant with an undeniable passion for aviation. He was reasonably skilled with his hands and worked manual jobs in Boston, New York, Buffalo, Tonawanda, Johnstown, Pittsburgh, and finally Bridgeport, Connecticut. While in Boston in 1897 he built a glider for the Boston Aeronautical Society. The glider did not fly, whether because of Whitehead’s workmanship or the Society’s direction, it's hard to say. He continued building and experimenting with airplanes, and his supporters claim that he made powered flights in both Pittsburgh in 1899 and Bridgeport in 1901 and early 1902. His letters to periodicals and interviews in newspapers claim powered flights as early as 1898 and as late as 1903. He was, in fact, one of several turn-of-the-century experimenters who regularly issued press releases that described successful flights with no real evidence to back his claims. Whitehead made his last airplane in 1908 — which did not fly — then went on to build helicopters which did not fly. The memory of Gustave Whitehead's aeronautical experiments faded as powered flight became a reality. They were briefly resurrected in 1913 during the "Patent Wars" between the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss. Curtiss' lawyers raised the possibility that Whitehead and others may have preceded the Wrights in powered flight. Both the US District Court for Western New York and the United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, where the case was adjudicated, examined the evidence and found it wanting. So instead, Curtiss set about rebuilding Samuel Langley's Great Aerodrome that had crashed into the Potomac in 1903 to prove that it could have flown before the Wrights. The Court's Decision on Whitehead And there the matter rested until January 1935, when the magazine Popular Aviation published an article about Whitehead - "Did Whitehead Precede Wright In World's First Powered Flight?" by Stella Randolph and Harvey Phillips. The parts of this long article that made the readers sit up and take notice were the accounts of three powered flights, all alleged to have taken place before the Wright brother’s first powered flight on December 17, 1903. 1899 — "...in the Oakland suburb of Pittsburgh in the Spring of 1899, [a]…steam-driven model had carried him and his assistant a distance of almost a mile . Firemen…lent their assistance that time to start the machine, while the assistant fed charcoal to the flame which heated water in the ordinary kitchen boiler which they were using. …[A]s they went onward and upward, steered by Gustave Whitehead at the controls in the front, they exceeded the distance originally planned and found themselves headed for a three-story brick house. Afraid to attempt to swerve, there was but one hope, namely that they might clear the top of the house. But they failed. Down fell the machine, all but demolished, while the agonized fireman in the back writhed with the pain of a scalded leg." 1901 — "The mile and a half flight, made August 14, 1901, occurred at Lordship Manor, now a suburb of Bridgeport...One day, [the No. 21 airplane] was pushed into the street from the backyard of the modest house, 241 Pine Street, which was then the Whitehead home…Inside it, two engines were humming, one for propelling the wheels on which it was to get its start upon the ground, the other to turn the propellers when the machine was in the air. The small boys of the neighborhood came running, attracted by the unusual….They drew excited breaths of awe, and whistled through their teeth as the creature dashed down the road, rose from the ground, not many feet higher than their heads, and flew above the dirt road that was then Pine Street." 1902 "On the afternoon of January 17, 1902, the weather looked promising. It was the day [Whitehead] and his helpers had been seeking, so they quietly took their new avion, No. 22, to the beach outside Bridgeport and started its kerosene motor. Gustave Whitehead took his place at the controls of the machine, the men gave it a preliminary push, and it trundled away on its three wheels and was off! The plane performed so admirably that its owner continued his flight for a distance of two miles over the Sound, following the shore line of the beach…The men pulled it ashore, and now Gustave Whitehead proposed to fly across the Sound…He took off again …[and] was steadily progressing out across the Sound…when it occurred to him that it might be interesting to see if he could make his machine turn…He turned the rudder slowly and drove one propeller faster than the other…Steadily and rapidly the machine came about until he was facing his starting point. As he neared his rejoicing helpers on the shore, he slowed the speed of the plane and again dropped it gently into the water. It had traveled a distance of approximately seven miles, not across the Sound, but it had made the first turn in the air so far as has been recorded." Note: If you'd like to read Randolf and Phillips Popular Aviation article in its entirety, click HERE. Parts of Randolph and Phillip's tale were obvious fabrications. The account of the 1899 flight in a steam-powered airplane, with a fireman stoking the fire under the boiler, paints a wonderful picture in the best tradition of the American tall tale. The story of the 1902 flights is just as hard to swallow when you read the American Inventor article that is its one and only source. Whitehead offers no pictures of this mostly-metal aircraft and the editor describes himself as "hardly able to credit the account...that a man has actually succeeded in flying." So Whitehead promises photos will come but never sends them. If you further read the newspaper interviews with and stories about Whitehead from the same time period, it becomes clear that the No. 22 never existed. Note: If you'd like to read the 1 April 1902 letter from Gustave Whitehead to the editor of the American Inventor, click HERE. The only remotely plausible account of a powered flight in a Whitehead airplane is the story of the No. 21 in 1901. But this too unravels when you begin to poke around. Considering the Sources Much of that article was inspired by a story titled "Flying" that appeared in the Bridgeport Herald on 18 August 1901. The Herald was published every Sunday and featured local Connecticut news. This particular edition reported a flight that Whitehead claimed to have made four days earlier. This story had fairly wide coverage - it went out over the wire and within a few weeks was repeated in over eighty papers, among them the Boston Transcript and the New York Herald. However, it's telling that not one of the four daily newspapers in Bridgeport mentioned the flight. The story didn't even make the front page of the Bridgeport Herald itself – it was buried five pages back in a section where editor Richard Howell regularly published human interest stories and other "soft" news. The Bridgeport Herald "Flying" is difficult to believe in places, much more than Randolph and Phillip’s retelling. For example, the reporter claims that before Whitehead flew, he sent the No. 21 aloft with 220 pounds of sand in place of the pilot. The machine landed safely, the sand was unharmed, so Whitehead took the controls. Owing to fantastic details like these, the story lacked what advertisers have come to call verisimilitude – the appearance of truth. So despite wide coverage and implications that mankind had successfully flown, the public yawned. After all, this was an old game in late Victorian America. Whitehead used these newspaper stories to announce that he was taking on a partner – a mysterious Texan named W. D. Custead – and the two were beating the bushes for additional funding, even though Custead claimed to represent a "company of Southern gentlemen with unlimited capital." The multiple newspaper accounts had all the hallmarks of yet another public relations campaign designed to attract investors. Note: If you'd like to read the Bridgeport Herald article "Flying" in its entirety, click HERE. Other sources, many of them letters and statements from Whitehead himself, contradict the Bridgeport Herald. In the June 1901 issue of Scientific American, Whitehead tells the readers that the No. 21 can make a turn in the air by varying the speed of the propellers. He has an engine which pumps gas under high pressure to pistons driving the propellers, and he can vary the pressure of the gas to each prop. The 18 August 1901 edition of the Bridgeport Herald tells us a little more about this engine - it is fueled by "rapid gas explosions" from acetylene generated from calcium carbide. Yet in that same article Gustave Whitehead gives a firsthand account of a turn he made in the air to avoid a clump of trees and asserts, "I had no means of steering (italics ours) by using the machinery." This just two months after telling the Scientific American audience he could turn by varying the speed of the props! So he claims to shift his weight, the airplane banked into a turn and he avoided disaster. Months later in his letter to The American Inventor, Whitehead claimed to be flying the No. 22 over Long Island Sound on 17 January 1902. As he was cruising along, he remembered that he could vary the speed of the props to make a turn. However, according to that same letter, he was using an internal combustion kerosene engine to run them. He had apparently discarded the acetylene engine, and with it went the alleged means for varying gas pressure and prop speed. We asked Andy Kosch, who built and flew a replica of the No. 21 in 1986 and 1987 about these discrepancies. Andy maintained that Whitehead had some sort of "transmission" in the No. 22 to vary the prop speed, although Whitehead did not mention it in his letters to publications. Andy also told us that he doubted that the quotes ascribed to Whitehead in the Bridgeport Herald article were really his own words. "A German immigrant wouldn’t talk like that," Andy observed. This begs a bigger question – if the reporter was putting words in Whitehead’s mouth, what else was he making up? Other details in these sources run the gamut from puzzling to incredulous. In November, the Bridgeport Herald and the New York World reported the incredulous: Whitehead was within spitting distance from having an aircraft factory up and running. He would be selling six passenger airplanes for $2000 apiece, according to an interview. As for puzzling, the letters Whitehead sent to Scientific American and The American Inventor reveal that the horsepower-to-weight ratio of Whitehead’s engines declined with each new model. According to his own telling, the efficiency of the acetylene engine driving the propellers in the No. 21 was 1.75 pounds per horsepower. Four months later in the No. 22, Whitehead uses a kerosene engine with an efficiency of approximately 3 pounds per horsepower, a drop of over 70 per cent. In all fairness, there is some evidence that Whitehead had some skill as an engine maker in later years. Charles Whittaman, an airplane builder on Long Island, bought two engines from him in 1908 and 1910 and was well-satisfied – enough to call him a "very able designer." But in the years in question - 1899 to 1902 - his words and actions are impossible to reconcile. He tells us he is getting wonderful results from each new airplane and engine; then he discards them, never flying them again. Aeronautical engineering, like all scientific disciplines, depends on reproducible results for true advancement. One of the most incredulous parts of the Whitehead legend is that he never seems to have any. In her article, Stella Randolf reports that Whitehead made 56 airplanes in a career that spanned a dozen years – 4.6 aircraft per year, which is in itself an unbelievable claim – and several of these flew, among them the No. 21. (It was actually his forty-something aircraft; he hadn't bothered to number the early ones.) Yet rather than make test flights and investigate the envelope of what he claims is a capable flying machine, his No. 21, Whitehead immediately goes on to a six-passenger version (No. 21-1/2?) and then the imaginary No. 22. He claims to fly No. 22 only twice and goes on to fly gliders in 1904 and perhaps afterwards. In 1906 and 1908, we have documented failures of two powered airplanes, the last of which he built for Stanley Beach, son of the editor of Scientific American. Why couldn’t Gustave Whitehead reproduce the results he claimed earlier? The Legend Reborn Despite its implausible claims, discrepancies and contradictory sources, the Popular Aviation magazine article lit a fire under a few interested scholars. The Harvard University Committee on Research in the Social Sciences sent John Crane, a professor of economics to Connecticut. (At the time, Crane was working on a book on the history of aviation.) He began to interview the residents of Bridgeport to find out more details about Whitehead's 1901 and 1902 flights. To his surprise, he found only one person who could remember Whitehead's flights, despite the mention of "affidavits" in Randolph and Phillips' article. He interviewed several people who had business dealings with Whitehead, among them John J. Dvorak, a businessman who spent time in Bridgeport waiting for Whitehead to produce an engine. Dvorak told Crane that during the six months he spent in Whitehead’s home town in 1904 - before Whitehead was making glider flights - he never met a single person who could remember seeing Whitehead fly. Crane published the results of his investigation in an objective and dispassionate article in the National Aeronautical Association Magazine in December 1936. It was called "Did Whitehead Actually Fly?" In it he concedes the possibility that Whitehead made short, unsustained hop-flights ("momentum flights"), but found it highly unlikely he actually flew – that is, made controlled and sustained powered flights. Note: If you'd like to read John Crane's report in its entirety, click HERE. This state of amnesia didn't last very long, however. In 1940, Charles Whitehead was introduced on the radio show Famous Firsts as "the son of Gustave Whitehead, the first man to fly in a heavier-than-air machine." The Whitehead story as heard on the radio was retold in Liberty magazine in April 1945, and the Liberty article was condensed in Reader's Digest in July 1945. It ran under the heading of "First" by Mort Weisenger. "In 1940, (Joseph Nathan) Kane went on the air with Famous Firsts, parading such milestone-makers as Clarence Birdseye, perfecter of the frozen-food process; Anna Jarvis, founder of Mother's Day; and the late Colonel Jacob Ruppert, whose Yankee team was the first modern ball club to cop three pennants in a row. "It was during one of these programs that Kane presented Charles Whitehead of Bridgeport, Conn., as "the son of Gustave Whitehead, the first man to fly a heavier-than-air machine – two years, four months and three days previous to the Wright flight at Kitty Hawk. " This was such a sensational claim that it cost Kane several hundred dollars to convince skeptics. At his own expense he mailed out thousands of photostatted newspaper clippings describing in detail a half-mile motor-controlled flight made by Gustave Whitehead, a Bavarian, on August 14, 1901. These were supplemented with copies of 11 affidavits signed by eyewitnesses…" Orville Wright was still living at this time. He was aware of the Whitehead story, but did not think anyone took it seriously until it made its way into Reader's Digest. The 1945 story prompted him to write a short rebuttal, "The Mythical Whitehead Flight," in the U.S. Air Services Magazine in August 1945. "The myth of Gustave Whitehead having made a power flight in 1901 was founded upon the story which appeared in the Bridgeport Herald of August 18, 1901…The Herald represented that just four persons were present on the occasion – Gustave Whitehead, Andrew Cellie and James Dickie, his two partners in the flying machine, and a representative of the Herald. In an affidavit dated April 2, 1937, the above-mentioned James Dickie, after saying that he had worked with Gustave Whitehead when Whitehead was constructing and experimenting with aeroplanes, said: ‘I do not know Andrew Cellie, the other man who is supposed to have witnessed the flight of August 14th, 1901, described in the Bridgeport Herald. I believe the entire story in the Herald was imaginary, and grew out of the comments of Whitehead in discussing what he hoped to get from his plane. I was not present and did not witness any airplane flight on August 14, 1901. I do not remember or recall ever hearing of a flight with this particular plane or any other that Whitehead ever built.’" "…In May, 1901, Stanley Y. Beach visited Whitehead at Bridgeport and wrote an illustrated article about Whitehead's machine, which was published in the Scientific American of June 8, 1901. Later he induced his father to advance money to continue Whitehead's experiments. Although Beach saw Whitehead frequently in the years from 1901 to 1910, Whitehead never told him that he had flown. Beach has said that he does not believe that any of Whitehead's machines ever left the ground under their own power, in spite of assertions of persons thirty-five years later who thought they remembered seeing them. Beach's nine years association with Whitehead placed him in a better position to know what Whitehead had done than that of other persons who were associated with Whitehead but a short time, or those who had so little technical training, or so little interest that they remained silent for thirty-five years about an event which, if true, would have been the greatest historic achievement in aviation up to that time. If Whitehead really had flown, certainly Beach, who had spent nearly ten thousand dollars on the experiments, would have been the last to deny it."



Gustave Whitehead, born 1874, died 1927.

A steam engine built by Whitehead. This was similar to the steam engines used by Locomobile, a Bridgeport automobile manufacturer where he had worked.

Whitehead seated with his daughter Rose beside the "No.21," built in 1901. He claimed to have made short flights in this aircraft. Whitehead airplane No.22, which is alleged to have made longer flights, was similar but the frame was supposedly made of aluminum tubing rather than bamboo.

A rear view of Whitehead's No.21. This photo was taken near Whitehead's shop at 241 Pine Street. The folks beneath the left wing are (from left to right) Stanley Y. Beach (who wrote an article on the aircraft for Scientific American ), Andrew Cellie, Daniel Varoni, and Gustave Whitehead with his daughter Rose on his lap.

And a view from above. The wings are very similar to those of Otto Lilienthal's gliders.

The Whitehead No. 21 with the wings folded. Lilienthal gliders also had foldable wings.

View Whitehead's Shop in a larger map.

The former location of Whitehead's shop in Bridgeport, CT and the location where the August 14, 1901 flight allegedly took place. If you use Google Earth and you'd like to explore this neighborhood online, click HERE.

The story in the Bridgeport Herald was accompanied by this sketch of the No. 21 in flight by staff artist "Dad" Barber. Whitehead advocates suggest the art was based on an actual photograph, which is an impossibility. The alleged flight was made during the night of a new moon, so there not enough light available for photography. There was no "low-light" film in 1901; the ASA of available films were in the single digits.

Whitehead built this triplane glider in 1903 and allegedly flew it until 1904. Although this photo seems to show the glider was flightworthy, uncropped versions of the photo show it suspended on wires for the shot. There are, however, other shots of this glider showing it being towed aloft.

In 1904, Whitehead built and flew a second glider, this with Lilienthal-style wings.

Whitehead's patent for his 1904 glider, granted in 1908.

In 1905, Whitehead added an engine and propeller to his 1904 glider. He attempted to fly it in 1906 but was unsuccessful. He called it the "Albatross."

Whitehead built this odd aircraft for Stanley Y. Beach in 1908. It actually had two sets of wings – flat, camber-less biplane wings forward of the fuselage and Lilienthal-like monoplane wings just behind them. It never flew under its own power, but it was towed aloft behind Beach's automobile.

Whitehead's last known aeronautical project was this helicopter with over 60 small rotors. The engine was not powerful enough to drive the rotors at the speed required for lift off.

A Whitehead 4-cylinder engine with a small gravity-fed fuel tank installed in an airplane, possibly the airplane he built for Stanley Beach in 1908. It is occasionally mistaken as the engine in the No.21.

Another view of Whitehead's 1908 engine.

Gustave Whitehead with a lightweight two-cylinder engine. He manufactured about 30 engines altogether.