In late 1963, O’Dwyer assumed duties as head of a research committee jointly sponsored by the CAHA and the 9315th Air Force Rescue Squadron. He began with eight pages of leads compiled by Harold Dolan, a Sikorsky Aircraft engineer and vice president/secretary of the CAHA. The Whitehead/Wright/Smithsonian evidence amassed by O’Dwyer now fills 20 file drawers in his home near Fairfield Center, with an orderly overflow of bulging cardboard boxes reaching from his small office into adjacent rooms. The CAHA information on Whitehead is filed at the New England Air Museum at Bradley International Airport, Windsor Locks, Conn., under the stewardship of archivist Harvey Lippincott.

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To date, the total evidence, based on three decades of research, has convinced O’Dwyer and others that history has indeed been ‘tampered with.’

In addition, the record was spelled out in O’Dwyer’s book History by Contract, published in Germany in 1978, with Stella Randolph as coauthor. The book accused the national Air and Space Museum (NASM) of an apparent conspiracy of silence interspersed with behind-the-scenes demeaning of Whitehead’s efforts. The net result, O’Dwyer and Randolph alleged, made Whitehead a virtual nonentity in aviation annals.

Gustave Whitehead was born Gustave Alvin Weisskopf on January 1, 1874, in Leuterhausen, Bavaria, Germany. Growing up in the era of Otto Lilienthal, the German glider pioneer, young Weisskopf became obsessed with the idea of flying. Later, he met and corresponded with Lilienthal, learning something of the rudiments of flight.

Orphaned at age 12, Weisskopf worked his way to Brazil as a seaman a few years later. During his four years at sea, he showed aptitude for the many mechanical skills needed aboard ship. Still dreaming of flying, he studied the flight of sea birds. He also survived four shipwrecks, the last of which put him ashore in 1894 on the Gulf Coast near the Florida Panhandle.

Weisskopf wandered northward, surviving on whatever work he could find. He reached Boston in 1897 after learning that the Boston Aeronautical Society had a job opening for’someone with kite and glider experience.’ He was hired mainly because of his work with Lilienthal. Financed by the society, he built a biplane/ornithopter, a man-powered craft with flapping midwings. Not surprisingly, it failed to fly.

Weisskopf’s travels next took him to New York City, where he demonstrated kites for the Horseman Toy Company and met his future wife, Louise Tuba, a Hungarian emigr. The couple’s next stop was Buffalo, where they were married; then Baltimore, where their name was Anglicized to Whitehead. They then went to Pittsburgh, where Gustave began his efforts at powered flight.

In the spring of 1899, after finding work as a coal miner, he built a two-man aircraft powered by a steam engine. The project ended when the craft, with Whitehead as pilot and Louis Darvarich aboard as a stoker, crashed into a three-story building. Darvarich suffered lifelong scarring from steam burns and spent three weeks in a hospital. Whitehead, up front at the controls, escaped injury. It remains unclear as to whether or not the machine was airborne when it struck the building.

Whitehead, who had become unpopular with his neighbors and the police because of noisy nighttime tests of his steam boilers, which occasionally blew up with a roar, soon left town by bicycle with Darvarich. They sold their bikes in New York and continued by train to Bridgeport, Conn., where Darvarich had friends. Whitehead took a temporary job in a coal yard, then found more permanent work as a factory machinist. When his wife and daughter Rose arrived in Connecticut in 1900, the family moved into a house in Bridgeport’s West End.

Whitehead resumed his efforts at flight, working nights in his basement. Later, he used $300 donated by an enthusiastic Bridgeport resident to buy materials to build a shedlike shop in the yard of his house. Neighborhood teenagers, captivated by Whitehead and his work, became his unpaid helpers. His efforts ranged from studying tethered seagulls to reading scientific journals and Octave Chanute’s two books on aeronautics.

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