Gustave Whitehead and the First-Flight Controversy

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‘Whitehead had grown calmer now and seemed to be enjoying the exhilaration of the novelty. He was headed straight for a clump of chestnut sprouts that grew on a high knoll. He was now about forty feet in the air and would have been high enough to escape the sprouts had they not been on a high ridge. He saw the danger ahead and when within two hundred yards of the sprouts made several attempts to manipulate the machinery so he could steer around [the trees], but the ship kept steadily on her course, head-on for the trees.

‘Here it was that Whitehead showed how to utilize a common sense principle which he noticed the birds make use of when he was studying them in their flight. He simply shifted his weight to one side more than the other. This careened the ship to one side. She turned her nose away from the clump of sprouts when within fifty yards of them and took her course around them as prettily as a yacht on the sea avoids a bar. The ability to control the air ship in this manner appeared to give Whitehead confidence, for he was seen to take time to look at the landscape about him.’

Howell’s account continued: ‘He had soared through the air for fully half a mile and as the field ended a short distance ahead, the aeronaut shut off the power and prepared to alight. He appeared to be a little fearful that the machine would dip ahead or tip back when the power was shut off, but there was no sign of any such move on the part of the big bird. She settled down after the propellers stopped and lighted on the ground on her four wooden wheels so lightly that Whitehead was not jarred in the least.’

In the 1930s, author Stella Randolph questioned James Dickie-named as one of Whitehead’s helpers by Howell-about his part in the claimed flight of August 14, 1901. Dickie denied he had been present and also said that he never knew anybody named Andrew Cellie. The Smithsonian and other Whitehead detractors later used the apparent discrepancy to cast doubts on the credibility of Howell’s Herald article.

‘In 1963,’ O’Dwyer said, ‘when I read of Dickie’s denial, I wondered if he was the same Jim Dickie I’d known ever since I was a youngster. I phoned him, and although he was much older than I, he remembered me well and we kidded each other about the old days. But his mood changed to anger when I asked him about Gustave Whitehead.

‘He flatly refused to talk about Whitehead, and when I asked him why, he said: ‘That SOB never paid me what he owed me. My father had a hauling business and I often hitched up the horses and helped Whitehead take his airplane to where he wanted to go. I will never give Whitehead credit for anything. I did a lot of work for him and he never paid me a dime.’ I noticed, though, that Dickie did not tell me he was not with Whitehead on August 14, 1901, saying simply, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ Also, he did not say he never knew anyone named Andrew Cellie-not surprising since Cellie was Dickie’s next-door neighbor on Tunis Hill in Fairfield, and they both hung around Whitehead’s shop.’

O’Dwyer, searching through old Bridgeport city directories in the 1970s, found that Andrew Cellie, a Swiss or German immigrant also known as Zulli and Suelli, had moved to the Pittsburgh area in 1902. Meanwhile, Cellie’s former neighbors in Fairfield assured O’Dwyer that Cellie had ‘always claimed he was present when Whitehead flew in 1901.’

Orville Wright wrote an article for U.S. Air Services magazine in 1945 under the headline, ‘The Mythical Whitehead Flight.’ An excerpt follows: ‘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 on June 8, 1901….Although Beach saw Whitehead frequently in the years 1901–1910, Whitehead never told him 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.’

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