The Guggenheims: Aviation Visionaries

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The names and contributions of the Wright brothers, Glenn Curtiss, Charles Lindbergh and James H. Doolittle are well known. But what about Daniel and Harry Guggenheim? Who were they–and what did they do for aviation? The answer is that they were a father and son who deserve to be remembered for their benevolence and foresight in using their great wealth to sponsor, guide and finance a number of different programs that greatly advanced the science of aeronautics in the late 1920s. Daniel was not a scientist and had never flown. He did not own an airplane. His son Harry had graduated from Navy pilot training, but he never had participated in any noteworthy flights. Nevertheless, everyone flying today, as passenger or crew member, is a beneficiary of their wisdom and vision.

Daniel Guggenheim, small in stature and gifted with enormous foresight and business acumen, was the second of eight sons raised by Meyer Guggenheim. A Philadelphia businessman and financier, Meyer cut short Daniel’s education and sent him to Switzerland to manage the family’s manufacturing and merchandising firm at the age of 17.

Daniel returned to the States in 1884 at the age of 28 and took over another family enterprise, a mining and smelting business. The result was the accumulation of a large fortune. But Daniel’s business sense was balanced by a strong awareness of his social responsibility, which resulted in a long list of philanthropic efforts that would include education, the arts, medical research and numerous charities.

Daniel had two sons, Meyer Robert and Harry Frank, both of whom served during World War I. Robert was not interested in aviation. But Harry, youngest of the two, was smitten with the flying bug after Navy flight training and service in France, England and Italy. He came home to a country that was badly outmatched in aviation development and had fallen far behind Europe in commercial aviation progress. America had failed to put a single American-designed, American-made aircraft into actual combat during the war.

Three thousand pilots and 15,000 aviation mechanics returned to the States to find an apathetic public unable to grasp the possibility of aviation as an instrument of national power. Airplanes were considered playthings that were romanticized in the pulp magazines. Only foolhardy barnstormers risked their necks in war-surplus machines at state fairs. Crashes and deaths were commonplace and expected; as a result, the public had little faith in the use of aircraft for personal travel. Pilots were considered, as one writer noted, ‘a fatalistic lot who scorned death, partied until dawn, and then took off bleary-eyed, disappearing into a sunrise, never to return.

The United States clearly was in the doldrums so far as aviation was concerned. By contrast, a year after the armistice, Britain and France were operating scheduled flights between London and Paris. The Germans had an all-metal transport 10 years before William Stout designed one for Henry Ford. The French had an internal airmail system that far outdistanced the United States’ fledgling airmail service. Italy’s Gianni Caproni had built a 100-passenger, eight-engine flying boat. And even the Russians, as far back as 1913, had a four-engine airliner designed by Igor Sikorsky that boasted an enclosed cockpit and passenger cabin, electric lights and a washroom.

In America, the airmail pilots and the barnstormers were the only representatives aviation had during the first half of the 1920s. Air transport was nonexistent; there was no motivation on the part of the public to travel by air. The Army and the Navy possessed mostly obsolete equipment left over from the war; manufacturers did not have the resources to develop new aircraft and were not encouraged to do so. And there were only a few voices that touted the potential of the airplane. One supporter was Billy Mitchell, who martyred himself out of the Army by his shocking statements about the sad state of American military aviation. At the same time, there were many headline-grabbing plane accidents that substantiated his views that not enough emphasis was being placed on aeronautical research and development.

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